Just wondering have anyone looked into the new DirectPlay 8.0 as I heard that more features are included in this new version for creating massive multiplayer games. Thoughts or comments?

Function Callbacks are your primary method of receiving / send completion. It is a MUCH better than the DPlay 4 method of polling / queries. There is also a new flag to prevent internal message copies which will help when you''re trying to fill a network pipe. It resembles Winsock2 Overlapped I/O much more now.

I''ve written some C++ Classes that encapsulate all of the initialization of the IDirectPlay8Server, IDirectPlay8Client and IDirectPlay8Peer interfaces, and am working on a Message Class as we speak to flush out sending / receiving. After I get that done and am able to stress-test the classes a bit, I''ll release it so you all can see a basic example.

Yeah I put my packet code on hold and am implementing dplay8 for the data streamer.

Want I want to know is, can you use client/server & peer2peer at the same time... I''ll find out soon enough...

the changes to dplay8 make it not only usable, but useful!

quote: Original post by JonStelly

I''ve written some C++ Classes that encapsulate all of the initialization of the IDirectPlay8Server, IDirectPlay8Client and IDirectPlay8Peer interfaces, and am working on a Message Class as we speak to flush out sending / receiving. After I get that done and am able to stress-test the classes a bit, I''ll release it so you all can see a basic example.

Wow, that''s really nice of you. Thanks! ;-)

Magmai, that''s a very interesting idea. I don''t _think_ that it''s possible because of the election method of selecting a new host. The Peer interface has all of the functions of the Server and Client interfaces I believe. Let me know if it works in testing though, it could be useful.

Imagine that you have certain network / cpu minimum requirements to play the game, but more strict requirements to host a game. If the machine falls below the specs to host a game, use the client interface so it never gets elected as the host during a host migrate(not that it ever should).

M$ & thier elections...

Why does the election/peer host prevent it?

I want to make a distributed network where each client can serve as a sever as well; but i still want a connection to the primary (or trusted) server too.

quote:
Imagine that you have certain network / cpu minimum requirements to play the game, but more strict requirements to host a game

Yeah, like DiabloII! I couldn''t stand to play it over the internet, thier ip networking code needs(ed?) help.
...did they use direct play?

You can still do that using only the IDirectPlay8Peer interface. Just don''t use the DPNSESSION_MIGRATE_HOST value when calling IDirectPlay8Peer->Host().

As far as having your clients help distribute the server load, you can still do that, but DirectPlay doesn''t have any internal mechanism to allow multiple servers, unless you had seperate sessions.