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Network Layer

Started by Lythic Jun 3, 2003 at 6:50 PM 2 replies 450+ views

Original Post

Jun 3, 2003 at 6:50 PM

I''ve read the article on the front page, which reviews some networking middleware products... I was wondering what the readers here might suggest for a server that must accept between 500 and 5000 players. It doesn''t have the same latency issues as MMO''s, so I don''t believe it''s neccesarily bound to the same technologies as they are. Latency isn''t an issue because the game is completely strategic, allowing a lot of time for the player to consider his actions, and the actions of others. Is anyone even using DirectPlay at all? I haven''t toyed with it at all, but I get the impression it isn''t feasible for commercial server use? I''d appreciate advice from someone more experienced in this area. Thanks.

Illumini

Jun 3, 2003 at 7:34 PM

DirectPlay is completely feasible otherwise I doubt microsoft would pour thousands of man hours into its development.

The reason alot of people don''t use it is because it can be a little scary at first. Not as simple as pure TCP/UDP/IP Winsock. Nor should it be, its a layer on top of such protocols (Well not TCP but thats beside the point).

It offers alot of features you may find useful in a large scale turn based strategy type game. However I''m not sure how well it would scale to 5k players. You''d have to look into that. The popular method for such a large number of connections seems to be IO Completion ports, but I know little about them to help you out

Lythic

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Lythic

Jun 4, 2003 at 12:02 PM

Thanks for that advice. Having taken a look around at a couple places, it seems that IOCP is the best way to go when handling the volumes I''ll be dealing with.

Funny how this post got replies in the DirectX forum but none in the networking forum. Maybe it''s a stupid question.

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