I want to start writing a turn-based game with multiplayer options. A game is played 1on1, so I guess a peer-to-peer connection can be used for this. However, also all clients should be connected to one server. This server serves as a lobby, so you can find games, and you have some other community-related possibilities there. As I said, once you enter a game, it is basically peer-to-peer, with only some data traffic between server and client at the start and end of the game, and maybe a little in between. The client application can be windows-only, I don't mind that. However, the server will probably be running on a unix platform, so I guess I cannot use C# for this? Any suggestions on what way to go? Also, what would be the best type of socket (not sure if that's the right way to say it): winsock, C# sockets, directplay (I guess not since it's deprecated), or something else that allows cross-platform, if the former ones don't? Since it's a turn-based game I guess TCP is an obvious choice here. Are there any more of these choices to make? (I'm a noob on multiplayer, so I know there's something called synchronous/asynchronous sockets but I'm not sure what it means) If anyone could point me out to a good starting point that would be great, but mostly I'd like your opinions on what programming language (if not C#) and sockets I should use. Thanks a lot!

I've never done any server/client stuff so I can't help there. But I can tell you that you can write C# applications for Linux, check out Mono.

Also you might like to consider kaillera's SDK to add multiplayer to your game. It could save alot of code that way, and there is already server app and clients for windows/linux.

But it's certainly worth hearing an opinion on how to do it in pure C# from scratch. I'm interested to hear about that myself.

thanks a lot, Mono seems to be what I need. I'm not sure if it can also run C# under linux if I use C# sockets, but if it can, I'm a 100% content with the solution. I prefer going without a 3rd party library for socket coding, it's not too hard to do myself and I prefer freedom over ease in this case.

I've toyed around with using C# sockets in Mono, and as far as I could tell the C# socket stuff works just the same in Mono as it does in .NET on Windows, and I could communicate between Windows and Linux without any extra difficulty. So I think it should be possible to write a client/server application that can run on Windows or Linux with C#.

that's great to hear! I will investigate Mono further, it seems to be exactly right for what I need.