I'm a relatively new programmer to the games industry and for the past six months I've been the secondary network coder for the game we're working on. I'm really enjoying network coding and am now planning to specialise in it. With this in mind, I started writing my own UDP network library at home to teach myself more about the low level stuff and it's coming along pretty well. There are some elements of my library, such as sequence and reliable packets, which I'd like to test out more thoroughly. At work we use a handy little tool from the PS3 SDK called NEST which allows you to simulate things such as latency, loss, jitter, order etc. Is there any software (preferably free) which I can use in Windows/Mac/Linux which does the same thing? Preferably on an application specific level so it doesn't affect anything else.

I was asking the very same question some time ago. See GameDev Forums: Simulating networking issues (loss, latency, etc.) if that's of any help.

by the time you find one you could probably just write one yourself. Most automated testing suites only replay a stream of messages that are recorded, unless you write some addon to create the stream . I believe the easiest way is to write a test client app to do the testing and record stats which is what I usually do .

I recently asked about the same thing, some kind of port forwarding software that would inject latency, throttling and packet loss. My research didn't turn anything up. I'm currently simulating latency on the client, but not simulating bandwidth or packet loss.

Let me know if you find something that runs on Windows.