Tools to rock on Network Programming.


	Creating a multiplayer game can be a lot of fun, but navigating the complexities of IP network programming can be a headache. That's kind of a strange statement, but the two go hand in hand. You can't write a multiplayer game without some sort of network-based communications, and game-related network programming introduces difficulties not often found with more simple applications. For example, most game developers are concerned with bandwidth utilization and throttling. There's also player session management to contend with. Then, there's the problem of message fragmentation, acknowledgement and sequencing. Oh, and you'd really like to be able to make your game run on both Linux and Windows. That's a tall order for developers who probably are more concerned with writing their games than they are in becoming experts in cross-platform network programming. Fortunately, the ENet library takes care of these details and presents developers with a simple, flexible and consistent API.

Creating a multiplayer game can be a lot of fun, but navigating the complexities of IP network programming can be a headache.

That's kind of a strange statement, but the two go hand in hand. You can't write a multiplayer game without some sort of network-based communications, and game-related network programming introduces difficulties not often found with more simple applications. For example, most game developers are concerned with bandwidth utilization and throttling. There's also player session management to contend with.

Then, there's the problem of message fragmentation, acknowledgement and sequencing. Oh, and you'd really like to be able to make your game run on both Linux and Windows. That's a tall order for developers who probably are more concerned with writing their games than they are in becoming experts in cross-platform network programming. Fortunately, the ENet library takes care of these details and presents developers with a simple, flexible and consistent API.

ENet's event-driven programming model makes client session management very simple. The library dispatches an event when a peer connects or disconnects, and when a message is received from a peer. The developer simply writes event handlers that take care of initializing and deallocating resources, and acting upon incoming messages. This means you don't have to worry about the complexities of forking, preforking, threading or nonblocking calls to connect() and accept() in order to handle multiple connections. With ENet, all you do is make periodic calls to its event dispatcher and handle the events as they come in.

ENet's event-driven programming model makes client session management very simple and provides for both reliable and unreliable transmission. Find out some more interesting features ENet provides here!.

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