I am trying to design a solid engine right now. I have read that it might be a good idea to "stream" instances of objects over the network, in a similar way to how you stream objects to disk for load/save games. However I want to use UDP for my games, and a similar technique to q3a, in which the server just sends to clients the data that has changed, which will probably be a subset of all the available class members. i.e. the server sends a list of actor objects, but say, only the position, velocities, weapon and life might change, and the mesh etc would stay the same. Is there a nice oop way to do this? Thanks, Rob

There are several ways to express such a networking structure using OOP design. You will need to deal with bits and bytes at the lowest level, because that's what goes across the networking level, but the relation between objects, sets of dirty data pending to be sent, users of incoming data etc can all be expressed using whatever your favorite mechanism is.

If you want a jump start, I suggest looking at some of the open source libraries available that already do this. OpenTNL or RakNet come to mind. Check the Forum FAQ for a bigger list.