Network Programming

It''s up to you in the end,

but if you''ve ever tried writing your own networking code, you''ll be glad about what DP does for you...
It can have high overhead I believe, so if your good enough, try writing your own network code - it''s almost always better than anything else available if done correctly.

Take it easy,

-Mezz

Industry standard right now is Winsock/BSD sockets programming. Its gives you about as much control as you could want over low-level stuff while still being abstract enough to be easy to use. Access to IPX and UDP are trivial with Winsock. Directplay is a dead API - Microsoft has stopped supporting it and it will be cut from further versions of DirectX. Ie - don''t use it

What are you talking about DirectPlay will be cut from DirectX? Where did you hear this? Most of the changes in DirectX 8 are to DirectPlay. Winsock does give you more control but it wasn''t written with games in mind. DirectPlay gets updated and improved every year. Winsock has only been updated once and its been around for about 10 years.

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Winsock does give you more control but it wasn''t written with games in mind. DirectPlay gets updated and improved every year. Winsock has only been updated once and its been around for about 10 years.

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Why would Winsock updates matter? It''s a low-level API, giving direct access to the protocol stack. DirectPlay is implemented as calls to the protocol stack.

If you want a fast addition of network code to your program DirectPlay isn''t a bad way to go.

On the downside DirectPlay has a monster size network overhead when forming connections. Even with all options turned as low as it can go, there is still some bandwidth overhead. Also there is an amount of processing time overhead (from non-local procedure calls, functions containing way too many brach instructions, etc.) associated with the DirectPlay functions. DPlay has so many features that you probably won''t use, so you pay an overhead cost just for having the features available. And DirectPlay is Windows only (if you care) so you can''t communicate with other platforms.

Plus if you want to get hired in the industry as a network programmer, knowing sockets is more impressive than knowing DirectPlay.

if you aren''t using a twitch game (like a fps) then direct play is a good way to go. It works.

If you are using a twitch game, learning sockets programming will be needed.

I haven''t found any tutorials on either that were to my liking but I haven''t looked that hard. I learned dplay from the microsoft help files and examples.