Networking

There are two stages to a networked game: the game creation/joining stage, and the gameplay stage. As is the norm with game development, there are many different ways to approach and design these stages, and you should choose the right one (or combination) based on the needs of your game.


In this section we will look at the options available and where you might use each one, before looking at what Windows 8 provides and how to implement them.

For a long time, multiplayer gaming has been an important part of many games, and sometimes it is the primary part of the game, getting a much larger focus than the finely-crafted single player experiences on offer. Games from the Battlefield and Call of Duty series, for example, place a high importance on multiplayer gaming, and many fans buy the game just to play with others, some not even touching the single player experience. While this may seem like the easy way to avoid writing intelligent opponents for single player, multiplayer can...