Introduction to Game Networking

Basic networking concepts for game development.

Well, where do I start. To clear out and not let you disappointed, programming is hard, programming games is hard, and we also added an extra layer with networking programming. Many things we discovered while at it, which makes us rework many systems, but we learn from it which is what matters.

One thing that should be obligatory to every single programmer up to contributing to this project is to understand basic networking concepts. There’s is no game without networking.

Network Packets

Networking is all about communication. The way we communicate between machines is via network packets, which are pieces of data sent over the network. Networking games uses that, and usually we have that part done for us when we use a high-level networking framework, which is why you will rarely see that while developing basic networking code.

Host

Never think hosting is another type of network setup, it is the server and one client, at the same time, doing different things. It’s just a quick way to test your application, the only issue is that it can be misleading.