Hi,

I want to support as many platforms as possible for networking, is there a good popular choice? What does Unity use?

Is there any particular features you want? If not then, the sockets API is available on pretty much every platform with networking and requires only minimal platform dependent code to work with (basically just WSAStartup() on Windows).

You can use System.Net.Sockets in Unity (which is the .Net version of the API SiCrane mentioned). I can confirm that it works on PC, OSX, iOS and Android.

Thanks for the responses, the type of networking I want to add (or have the capability for) includes simple multiplayer games, cooperative game play, network classic dm style game play, database registration, online content streaming, scalable morpg server capability etc, chat server, voip server

I have got loads of ideas, however I can't easily implement all this myself so a good high level general purpose middleware solution (and hopefully free, gpl or mit) with hopefully some examples would be ideal ... I am not looking for the best of any, just need the platform coverage and stability ... this should more or less cover the network back end of any software project.

I might still use an engine for my current game, maybe unity or udk, however I prefer to see the code because I have experience.

You might find ZeroMQ to your liking. Coupling it with protocol buffers works out to be a particularly nice framework.

-Josh

ZeroMQ does not have any reasonable solution for authentication. You should not use ZeroMQ on an untrusted internet. Even the "gateway" pattern in ZeroMQ doesn't properly enforce authorization to talk on the messaging fabric.

Using protocol buffers with ZeroMQ may work OK -- just like any other marshaling framework. For games, you probably don't need the overhead of protocol buffers, but if you're building a system that should stay up and compatible with a variety of client versions all operating at the same time, it does provide some nice features.