I''d check out www.hawksoft.com/hawknl .It''s a whole network layer for just about any platform you can think of. It''s free and designed for games.

"I would prefer to avoid winsock if possible.... I think I recall hearing that there is some open source thingy by Apache I believe anyone know about it or have any other recommendations?"


If you don''t have any solid ideas for a better solution, and ''some open source thingy'' is not a solid idea, then I wouldn''t be so fast to rule out Winsock.

As has been stated, if you want to go crossplatform for networking, you''re talking about sockets. Whether that''s Java sockets or Winsock / Unix Sockets, you''re going to be using a socket at some point. A Socket is just a notion of how you communicate over a network.