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Hey everybody! I've spent a few hours tonight looking over the commands available to setup a multiplayer connection. I was actually able to connect to a "net game" on a different computer.

Once connected, the communication commands seem extremely simple. (Send Integer / float / String, etc...) Too simple for my tastes! I'm not exactly sure how I should proceed implementing these commands so both server and client can effectivly communicate things such as the location of the ball.

I need to be able to send coordinates of a moving sphere back and forth, as well as the location and rotation amount of 8 objects and whether or not collisions are occuring. Do I send a batch of messages for every sync? Is that overkill? (At 30 frames a second, thats 30 batches of data. Is that an unreasonable amount of bandwith?) Something Like:

send sphere's x
send sphere's y
send sphere's z
for i=1 to 8
send object position z(i)
send object rotation z(i)
send object collide(i, 0)
next i



and just have it always decode the net messages in the exact same order? Any multiplayer theory is greatly appreciated. I'm just kinda making this up as I go along.

Do I have to worry about packets dropping or anything like that?

Loads of articles on both theory and practice here : http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=30

Oh, and a limitation of the commands is that you can only send one piece of information per sync - so send either an encoded string, or send a memblock.