[gameprogrammer] Re: Networking for games

I've been reading through the Quake II source and it
heavily agrees with your advice here.  Now I'm in the
middle of a discussion with a friend about threading. 
I was contemplating having a thread dedicated to
networking, but it looks like that will make my
project more complex than I want it to be.  I'm also
hearing that debugging threads is a real pain.  Right
now we fork on new connections since we're not going
for multiplayer right now.
What are your (or anyone's) experiences with
threading?

Vince~

--- Olof Bjarnason <olof.bjarnason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I don't know of any industry standard way for this -
> after all it is
> your own protocol.
> 
> One way of doing this, which is easily re-used later
> on, is NOT
> putting any "type" specifier in the header, ONLY the
> size and the
> data. The type could then be put in the data instead
> - making re-use
> of this protocol easy in the future.
> 
> Decide on a max-length first of all. Say you decide
> 200 bytes to be
> max length. Then a one-byte-header is enough, and
> you could go with a
> c structure like
> 
> struct Message {
>   unsigned char length;
>   unsigned char data[200];
> };
> 
> .. and the corresponding read/write procedure
> prototypes:
> 
> int writeToSocket(SockStructure* sock, Message*
> msg);
> int readFromSocket(SockStructure* sock, Message*
> msg);
> 
> Decide whether you want these to be blocking or
> non-blocking. If you
> are already using threads, then blocking is quite
> feasible. If your in
> a single-thread situation, non-blocking (ie.
> polling) is easier on the
> responsiveness of the application.
> 
> Be careful in the implementation, especially in the
> readFromSocket()
> procedure, since the whole message might not arrive
> and also two
> messages in a row might be concatenated. [ use some
> helper
> array/structure in order to store parts of arrived
> messages ..
> memcpy() might be handy here ].
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> /Olof


                
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