I noticed that A New Zero has networked play (clinet/server) and is a smallish procedural project so I fired off an email to the author, Alex Austin of Cryptic Sea. He sent back a nice reply with a couple links to some good info. so I am posting that part here, should anyone become interested in attempting to add such a system to ZGE. (could be some lurkers in the shadows, you never know,.)
The net code for A New Zero is pretty simple, it's similar to the Quake 3 networking model described here: http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/t ... Networking
I do a few things differently though, I send the object positions and game state each frame compressed as much as possible. For events that require guaranteed delivery I add those on to the end of the packet, the server keeps track of each clients location in the event list, and sends up to 8 events. The clients location in the event list is sent by the client to the server with the inputs, so the client is guaranteed to get each event in order. There's a few things I'm working on fixing, right now once there's around 12-16 players it really slows down because the packets get bigger because of the amount of objects and the server upload also increases due to the amount of clients. I'm planning on making the packets smaller by not sending positions for every object to every client in every packet, only the objects that are close to the player will be updated constantly. If you want some information on compressing packets, check out Jonathan Blow's page: http://number-none.com/product/index.html
Also I will be adding pigs on the wing eventually Alex
Jonathan Blow's archive of articles is quite very interesting in its own right for multiple subjects peace
Alex
peace