[casual_games] languages... (that's an 's' at the end!)

[Lennard Feddersen]

Coincidentally I have the DPlay doc's open on my desktop today - does 
.NET somehow make this easier to use?  I fiddled around with DPlay a bit 
back in 96 when we were talking about adding LAN play to Grand Slam 
Baseball and my recollections are painful.  That said, lobby software 
seems like a big thing to tackle properly and so I would like to find a 
solution that isn't rolling my own.  Ideally it would come with some 
commercial incentive as well, ie. use our software and be placed on this 
system that has 1 gazillion active game players - GameSpy offers this 
but the price is steep.

 From the Ovorp website:  /"Active development has stopped on the Ovorp 
engine. Like so many projects. I was in the middle of a reorginization 
when I ran out of steam on the project."

/What I'm looking for are compelling reasons to stray from tried and 
true software that is light weight and, when those hard to track down 
intermittent bugs do occur, easy to drill down in (which is why source 
code is a personal requirement when I take on 3rd party libraries).  
Also, specifcs about why particular libraries might be avoided (ie. if 
anybody knows about fatal flaws in DPlay).

Lennard Feddersen
CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
www.RustyAxe.com

Lennard at RustyAxe.com
P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7



Jonas Beckeman wrote:

>>Client/server stuff is one of the places I will be heading. How would
>>.NET make that easier?
>>    
>>
>
>DirectPlay, a library for online gaming, exists for managed code:
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnplay/html
>/dpov.asp
>though I seem to remember they'll be substituting it with something else
>soon(?)
>There's also functionality in the namespace System.Net, specifically
>System.Net.Sockets.
>I think the open-source Ovorp GDK relies heavily on networking, you could
>check that out.
>
>/Jonas
>
>
>  
>