   new to networking
  hi i have made a sidescrolling space shooter (think gradius / ikaruga) it has 2 players already but both of them have to play on the same keyboard.  What would be the easiest way to get it where i can have 2 players on different computers.  Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.I tried a little while back to do it myself but the game got desynched alot.  Is there a good LGPL networking library.  I looked in the forum faq already but it doesnt really say what would be suitable for my situation.  So im asking advice from the experts.Optimally i would like it to be:free or cheap license.  (its just a hobby i dont have 50k to put down)easy to use and well documented (im still a relativly new developer)good comunity or support forums.i dont really care too much about speed or lobby capabilities i just need something that works lol.Thanks alot guys =)   
  A network library won't inherently solve your de-sync problems. You have to structure the game so that it stays in sync -- for example, by sending the actual state (rather than input) once every second or so, and syncing up the other side based on this data.Network libraries are listed in the Forum FAQ.   ;Quote:Original post by hplus0603A network library won't inherently solve your de-sync problems. You have to structure the game so that it stays in sync -- for example, by sending the actual state (rather than input) once every second or so, and syncing up the other side based on this data.Network libraries are listed in the Forum FAQ.well im not looking for a libary im looking for reccomendations on a good one.  Im just asking if anyone has any experience using one of these and their recomendations to a newbie like myself.  The forum FAQ doesn't really differentiate much between the libraries.   ;  I've recently grown quite fond of RakNet, which is free to download, but costs $100 to use in an application you release.  I found it pretty simple to learn and work with, especially if you wrote your game in C++.  The documentation's good and the creator is very active on his forum (got back to me in under 24 hours with every question I asked, sometimes even offered patches to RakNet to change the behavior to the way I'd like.  Very nice).RakNet's only a library for sharing game data, though.  If you want something that'll go the next step and help you take care of keeping data in sync and keeping objects' positions in agreement, OpenTNL is popular.  It was the networking system for Tribes 2 originally, and it's quite powerful.  I found it rather annoying to learn and more poorly documented than I'd like.  Still, it's a very powerful networking library, so these things are to be expected.  Torque also offer a more complete whole game engine.The trick to keeping networking extremely simple is to assume very low latency (less than 10ms or so, i.e. a few guys on a LAN).  With that assumption, you can ignore all the really hard stuff, such as client side prediction.  The tradeoff is that it'd make your game really flaky on the larger Internet, which you may find unacceptable.   ;  If you rely on commands, you will end up desynched pretty fast unless you operate a deterministic lockstep system. You should update exact positions and velocities at least some of the time as well to make sure all the players have roughly the same state at all times.   ;  The FAQ claims that ENet and RakNet are the two most mentioned libraries. You could do worse than downloading both of them, reading the documentation, working through the examples, and figuring out which you like better.