I'm looking to learn more about using RPC in network apps/games and I was wondering if anyone could recommend some choice reading and RPC compilers that take an intermediate language and generate the client/server function call stubs. So far I have found rpcgen on google but was wondering if there were better ones out there or ones geared more toward C++ and OO design. Thanks in advance.

i hear OpenTNL has a great RPC system.

The standard compiler for MS-RPC is called midl. It should come with VC. Can't help you with reading though other than to browse the samples and MSDN.

IMHO RPC isn't really suitable for games that have anything resembling a real-time component. The RPC runtime takes away to much control. I have on occasion used the serialization services seperately from the full-on RPC though.

I agree it would be the worst thing ever for movement updates and the like but for simple non-continuous message passing, it seems like the way to go.

The main problem, at least with DCE-RPC (which is what MS-RPC is) is that it's a blocking model and that you can only have one RPC in flight at a time (i.e. you make an RPC and block until the remote server has received and processed the message and sent a reply). I don't remember if core DCE has support for asyncronous RPC's. I know MS does though but it's a minor pain to setup and you need to worry a lot about exactly how you manage your memory. It is also a passive-server model in that the client is the one that has to call up to the server, the server cannot just send data to the client whenever it wants.

Other RPC models may not have so many limitations. I'm only familiar with MS-RPC.