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Hi,

before I buy DarkBASIC, I would like to know if you can program
networked and Internet games for more than one player

i.e. is there a command that allows you to send data over a network
conection?

Regards,
Damian
Thanks in Advance

Yep, I've made a chat program in DBC using Benjamin's Tempest Plugin. If you have enhanced you should consider using that because DB's native multiplayer commands don't work as well.

Yes there are commands for this. however they're only included with the enhancement pack. the commands included are more than sufficient for dealing network multiplayer, but aren't up to the task of dealing with internet games these days.

Dark Basic's own commands will work over the internet. However they do not work through NATs (Hardware or Software). These days the majority of homes now have several machines (I believe) and so use routers to share their internet connection. This dramatically reduces the number of players who could play your game online.

Dark Basic Professional has no advantage here. The best you could do is check out the Tempest plug-in advertised by Duke Blue Devils, as its widely regarded by this community as a necessity for multiplayer programming with Dark Basic. Unfortunately, this also requires the enhancement pack, and I'm not sure if it comes included with Dark Basic.

haha, u can program an online game in DBCe no problem. I've got one almost fully working, just touching up the game-play and testing for bugs. The commands are VERY SIMPLE to use.

And what equipment are you using to connect to the internet with?

A) Dial-up 56K modem?
B) USB ADSL Modem?
C) ADSL Router?

If you have A or B then things are fairly straight forward. However, like SimSmall says if you (or any of the other players) have a router, then the ports will normally not be open and you/they will not be able to connect.

Routers have something called Network Address Translation (NAT) where you can set the traffic that is received on a port (or range of ports) to go straight through to a specific IP address on the network.

The problem is that the DB commands do not support the ability to state which port you want to use, so you can't set things up on the router's NAT settings page.

You could simply open every port on the router and turn off any firewall, but you would have to be totally mad to do that - you would be infected with virii and spyware in minutes!

The problem is down to the fact that DB's multiplayer commands were originally intended to be used to create multiplayer NETWORK games with TCP/IP - not internet games, so the use of routers were never considered.

The best alternative is to use a third-party DLL which supports the commands that you need.

TDK_Man