Hello, I'm a student attending Kent State and working on an undergraduate honors thesis this upcoming year. My project is going to have me coding a small plugin for C++ that promotes a standardized networking architecture in video games, but still allows enough openness as to not cripple the games. All I'm looking for at this moment are good sources and materials for such a project; sources that would help me in the long run. I've already read through this page, http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=30 and I think I found some that were pretty good, but they're also a bit dated. I was wondering if there were any more recent, related articles anyone knew about and might help me out. Even open-source examples I could draw from would work, seeing as I'll be writing more code than I will be recording observations. I'm also open for questions about the project itself. If anyone needs to know, I'm going to build off of RakNet, which is an open-source Networking Engine designed for Video Games, and is already good for what it does. I'll be coding some basic structures and trying to apply them to small, basic games in OGRE and OpenGL, nothing too fancy. Thank you.

You could try build a simple framework off of boost asio instead of raknet. You'd probably learn a lot implementing reliable UDP and other concepts.

Quote:Original post by Sephur
plugin for C++ that promotes a standardized networking architecture in video games

This statement doesn't make much sense. Are you programming a library? If so starting from Raknet would be like building a graphics engine from CryEngine.

Also make sure to look over the Forum FAQ it has some interesting topics.

Yeah, I don't blame that response. My adviser and I are still hashing out the details before I begin work in the Fall. I understand that RakNet is almost entirely all someone will need, anyways. I'm guessing that, if I use it, I'd be writing some includes and a few .libs which would promote a way of thinking about network architecture for games. Mostly things involving automated receiving/sending of data from/to a list of players, although a lot of it would probably be virtual functions, anyways.
Plus, the newest addition is the inclusion and testing of concepts in Molecular Dynamics; notably, the distinction between which molecules (users/players) are considered within an environment or resource and are then interacting with each other. You know, the concept of controlling which players are receiving what information, but also experimenting with it being dynamic across resources. Of course, I was suggested other libraries and interfaces for this anyways, like MPI, although I sort of feel obligated to use a boost library because my friends are super fond of it.

Anyways, that looks like a good place to begin. Perhaps I'll gun through that FAQ and see what I can find out.