RE: DirectPlay deprecated

[punkrock]

Grab the sockets API and write your own is the standard answer. That way you
can implement the leanest, most efficient networking scheme for your
application. That was the good news. The bad news is that unless you're
already familliar with socket-based network programming, you have a lot (as
in tons) to learn about security, reliability, and performance over a network.

You might want to poke around the internet to see if you can find any
libraries that someone else may have written, or old multiplayer games with
their source code available. Of course, those really aren't good options
since any existing code will be tailored to a purpose that's probably a ways
off from what you want to do. And 99% of it will probably be pure unmanaged
C/C++.

In either case, DirectPlay apparently wasn't a very good choice to begin
with. From what I remember, it was almost impossible to plug the security
holes, implement any sort of self-healing recovery on bad connections or
disconnect, or make it through any sort of firewall. However, I'm basing that
on the screams that came from "the network guys" on an old project, and this
was quite a few years ago so for all I know those issues may have been fixed,
or might have been exaggerations to begin with.

I hope I haven't made your future look too bleak,
Phill

[Chuck Walbourn [MSFT]]

Take a look at the latest version of the WinSock API, as well as the PNRP
and P2P technologies. They should all be easy to find searching MSDN...

--
Chuck Walbourn
SDE, Windows Gaming & Graphics

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.