Quote Originally Posted by technomage
So who would use this engine if it was based on Indy? I got the impression some people are in favour of writing this engine from scratch, which is a fair point but I for one am not a Networking expert so using Indy which has already tackled most of the platform specific issues seems to me like a good idea.
Uhm, i wouldn't use it if it depends on Indy. It's too big for a dependancy.. Also, it's component based which is something unuseful and wasteful for most games.. I'll be happy to use SDL_Net becouse it's very easy and becouse i already use SDL, but of course i can't hope you all agree or use sdl For most of you a DLL is not welcome i think
There's also the library i posted, synapse. Anyone gave it a shot? It's like indy but more lightweight and class-based instead of component-based.. Maybe we could just use the UDP classes.
Or we can develop a base UDP library. The socket api are easy enought to use, i've used TCP sockets directly for a long time, and udp are easier.

Anyway, my needs for a network library are:
- sending normal UDP packets.
- sending reliable UDP packets.

for the second point i think we could implement some very simple aknowledge system. Note that just very rare packets will need to be reliable (for game setup), so there's no need to have ultra performances.. Just a simple acknowledge system would do.

If you want to implement more advanced features, such as chat rooms and game setups, that's good, but it should be possible to just use the basic sending/receiving capabilities. They could be like two separated libraries, one on top of the other.

These were my two cents