[SDL] portable network

[David Olofson]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 17:52, Viktor Dick wrote:
> This is not really a question concerning SDL, but I think many SDL
> developers have experience in this because SDL is concerned to be
> portable and many games are designed to be played over network.
> Does anyone know some portable (especially running on Windows and
> Linux) libraries that offer an interface to deal a network?
> Something that would run under Mingw-make and under Gnu/Make(Linux)
> without rewriting the whole code? Does anyone have a link to a
> turorial or at least a reference?

Well, there is SDL_net, for the basic TCP and UDP stuff.
	http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_net/

For a nice and clean event driven layer over SDL_net, try NET2:
	http://gameprogrammer.com/net2/net2-0.html

Of course, you still need to implement your protocol, as both of the 
above deal with "raw" TCP and UDP. Most importantly (for 
portability), if you want to communicate anything other than strings 
of 8 bit characters, you'll need to make sure the protocol 
implementation deals with endianness. (Or PPC Macs won't be able to 
talk to Intel Macs or other x86 machines, for example.)

There are various higher level, more domain specific solutions as 
well, but I haven't used any of them. If all you need is non real 
time TCP, it's pretty trivial to roll your own, but making proper use 
of UDP can be a bit trickier. You'll need to deal with packets 
arriving out of order och being dropped, and for a real time game, 
you'll probably need to implement interpolation and prediction to 
deal with "high ping" and dodgy connections.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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