FYI: The underlying DirectPlay service providers for TCP/IP and IPX/SPX use IOCP when available.

I used Directplay for my network library because I have no desire of portability.

Im only developing for windows, but i''ve tried programming UDP before. It was fine at first but it became pretty hard when it got to the message throttling and a bunch of statistical things. Ill just tell you, directplay 8 in my opinion is much easier and since theyve rewritten the sucker, its just as fast. Besides, most people play games on windows so why even worry about porting?

most games are windows based, but most game servers are linux based...

For me, I am going with my own Network engine. I plan on porting my code to UNIX( SUN Solaris) and Linux(Playstation 2 Linux.) about TCP vs. UDP. As stated earlier, you''ll want to use UDP for a game because packets are delivered faster, but you can get severe packet loss of course. With TCP, your packets are garanteeded to be delivered, but this could slow down performance. Even under windows, I prefer to write my own network engine using sockets. You''ll learn more about network programming and theory that way. As I stated earlier, UNIX is actually my main developement OS over Windows XP(well, it getting there), so portability is important to me.

Edem Attiogbe