Anyway, now I'm ready to finish my game. The last two months I worked mostly on my network code. Its almost finished. The networking stuff is one of the bad parts of XNA. Don't get me wrong, the networking is nicely integrated in the Xbox environment and easy to use. However you can't use the XNA networking on windows, but you are forced to use XNA networking on the Xbox since the normal .NET networking classes are not accessible there. Therefore one needs two different networking implementations for Windows and Xbox. This sucks!
To support both implementations in my framework I wrote a wrapping layer which provides access to the XNA and Windows specific implementation on the respective platforms. Since I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, the code of the wrapping layer is based on some classes from the IndieFreaks Game Framework. The interface of the wrapping layer is oriented on the XNA networking capabilities. For XNA, the wrapping layer is therefore very thin.
The windows networking implementation uses the Lidgren networking library. Lidgren is really an excellent library and widely-used in .NET based games (AI War, XenoMiner, IndieFreaks Game Framework, etc.). Basically it is a layer over the unreliable, connectionless UDP protocol. Thus more complex features like session management (player joining, player leaving, start/end session, ...) are not supported, which means I had to implement them by my own. But this wasn't very difficult. Below you can see a sketch of the sequence diagram for the client join. It doesn't get more complicated than that. In XNA this is all hidden behind the provided API.
In the next post I will go into more detail how my networking system works on the game logic level.
