Hi, I am currently developing a multiplayer engine for a game my team is making. I am trying to design a flexible engine with an interface that allows the user of the engine to select the desired technology (currently attempting only implementing DirectPlay 8 and OpenNL 1.6, but should be able to add other technologes that works with the same interface) without having to change their code. The multiplatform issue will be taken care of by simply selecting technologies such as OpenNL (HawkNL) so i''m not too concerned about that, but at the moment my main problem is trying to make a DirectPlay component (server or client) communicate with an OpenNL component (client or server). I need to design the engine in such a way that allows me to create this flexibility despite the fact that DirectPlay is a fairly High-Level api that limits me in many ways. I''m thinking of various ways, but I want to know how the rest of the programming thinktanks handle this problem. Salman

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Original post by salqadri
my main problem is trying to make a DirectPlay component (server or client) communicate with an OpenNL component (client or server)

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DirectPlay has its own protocol and set of messages. I haven''t seen any formal documentation concerning the underlying DirecPlay protocols and I fear those are proprietary. You''d be better off having an encapsulation layer that is library-independent, and this layer would have to be used at both the client and server side at the same time.

-cb