DirectPlay is far more developer friendly than Winsock. Those of you who can''t get it going...I got it going in 2 hours having never used it before. Winsock would have taken months to develop libraries that DPlay has prewritten.

Accessability? Not sure what you mean.

Compatability is a loaded question. Most people who have Linux also have Windows so it''s not an issue consumer side. If you care about compatibility then you have to use Winsock.

Security in games is a prorgamming issue not a WinSock or DPlay issue. Though DPlay allows enxrypted packets with no additional programming.

Ben
http://www.icarusindie.com

I''m curious how the DP client/server scales.

It''s the same old story, if you can live with the limitations of existing code then use it; if you can''t then, well, it''s a long road to make your own so make sure you can''t live with those limiations.

DP features:
Standardized Lobby Support
Packet reliability settable per packet
Priorized Packet Queue
Multi-threaded network handlers
Voice Chat support

Winsock features:
Works on non-windows machines


Some time ago, the guys working on DP kicked around the idea of opening up the protocol so that servers could be made for other OS''s, but I don''t think it ever materialized.

I had a winsocket connection in about 20minutes. It took several hours with DP. For how easy it makes the other features, you''d think connecting wouldn''t be a big deal...

The scaling is the only thing I''m not sure about. I had 12,000 NPCs running around using a single connection and it handled fine. It took about 16 seconds to get them all updated. That''s about 53KB per second. 72Bytes per character * 12,000 / 16

I doubt that''s a DPlay limit. WinME blows for CPU intensive apps which the NPC client was running on. I should be able to update all 12,000 within 5 seconds. Which would allow me to split the work onto 5 computers which is acceptable.

I''m going to do more testing but that basically shows that bandwidth won''t kill you.

I still need to test connections though as more are added there''s no real decrease in server speed.

I think the connection limit is based on the speed of the processor and the amount of memory as well as how intensive the server program is.

2 hours to get a DPlay connection isn''t too bad considering once you have the connection there''s really nothing left to do. Figuring out how to do dynamic size messages took only an hour or so and that was it. I havn''t touched DPlay since.

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com

KalvinB ? Do you have a working small DirectPlay example I could have a look at ?

I don''t have anything I can show you but it''s all derived from the SimpleConnect demo included with the DX7 SDK. You just have to follow the source to figure out how it works and how to build on top of it.

Ben


Jump Down The Rabbithole

That article is only an opinion, which I think is incorrect. and besides, DirectPlay8 can''t be compared in any way to previous versions

Almar

No, I searched for it today, and couldn''t find it myself. I''ve searched for some nice encryption methods, like RC4, TripleD, BlowFish, TEA, and choose one that performed best for me without making the packetsize too big... I''ve just let it run over the byte buffer that DP8 uses (-in VB)