A fellow employee suggested that I look into CORBA for use in network games and I was wondering if any of you had information about CORBA or new good places to find information?

I do not have any experience with CORBA, however an internet search engine would be a good place to start digging. =)

-=[ Megahertz ]=-

Hmm, this may not work so well then since Microsoft .net is a windows thing and Java RMI is (obviously) Java. I want to use Linux and C++... ick.

Hi Drethon,

I'd suggest that you take a look at ACE. More specifically, TAO. ACE/TAO will bring you quite a bit of portability should you decide to move from Linux to Windows, and ACE is quite useful for other things besides CORBA.

Off of the link to TAO, there is a CORBA overview and a few tutorials.

Out of curiosity, why did he suggest using CORBA over a custom binary protocol that you develop?

-Halo7

He likes CORBA because of the platform independance and because it allows you to remotely view objects (so to speak) instead of communicating data across.

Hello Drethon,

Avoid CORBA, It is not very suitable for games.

I have had some use with it a ways back.

Reasons:

Most version form vendors you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it compiled.

Cost, I do not know of a free version of it.

All it is realy doing is wraping network code into objects so you don't realy care were they are located (ie local or across net) or how they upadted (you just change it and object takes care of update all instances).

Lord Bart :)

I would like to state that I believe any kind of synchronous RPC will introduce poor design decisions in a distributed simulation system. I am a firm believer in event-based simulation, and co-simulation with divergence detection and repair; such systems typically network much better over narrow and unreliable channels.

The difference between CORBA and most game architectures is actually similar to the difference between TCP and UDP, i e "reliability" versus "low latency" and "clean API" versus "high performance," although of course they are protocols at very different levels of the stack.