Well, here i go, attempting to build a network for my strategy game. I've attempted this sort of thing before with a previous project which used SDL_net. I found it to be rather clumsy, overall. Since then, i've learned a lot about programming in general and am looking into network libraries again for my newest project. (I really hate network programming, BTW. I'd rather gnaw my arm off) What i'm looking for is just something really simple. All i want is to be able to connect and to send/receive data. If a lib does more, i'm not against it, but i'm not looking for bloated be-all-end-all libs either. I also want something C++ oriented that doesn't deal with raw char buffers and other error-prone C-style jiggers. Something that worked as simply as this would be nice: network << num_bytes << packet_type << data; What networking library would you recommend for game programming? I'm googling for options, but it means more if you personally approve of one over the other. I'm wide open to suggestions. Thanks for your help.

I've heard people mention RakNet and ENet on these forums before. I'm afraid I use a somewhat hackish home-made (TCP) library for Java and for C#, so I guess I can't be much help :P.

http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/index.html