Im currently working on a MUD with a few other people, we have no idea how to make it multiplayer. I hear alot of people talk about Winsock and other sock type things. What is this and is there a good resource to check out? (books, urls whatever)

This could help:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=30

I wanna'' ride on the pope mobile.

Sockets are file-like IO channels which can be used for network connections. You open a socket, connect it to another, and then can read/write on it, sending/receiving data to/from the other. To create a server, you tell your socket to 'listen' for incoming connections and to create sockets locally when they occur.

I personally own "The pocket guide to TCP/IP Sockets (C Version)" by M.J. Donahoo and K.L. Calvert (ed. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers), which covers Unix (Berkeley style) sockets.

Winsock is a windows version of these, originally created by Trumpet Software, which are mostly compatible with Unix sockets.
The book also points to a website with Windows socket examples (http://www.mkp.com/socket).

Edit: Check the slides at http://cs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/PocketSocket/PocketSocketC.ppt

Edited by - Fruny on January 12, 2002 6:30:24 PM