CODEWITHSUNDEEP
network-programmingboost-asio
Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 588

How to handle passing different types of serialized messages on a network

I'm currently sitting with the problem of passing messages that might contain different data over a network. I have created a prototype of my game, and now I'm busy implementing networking for my game.

I want to send different types of messages, as I think it would be silly to constantly send all the information every network-tick and I would rather send different messages that contain different data. What would be the best way to distinguish what message is received on the receiving side?

Currently I have a system where I prepend a string which distinguishes a certain type of message. My message is then sent through my own message parser class where it determines the type, and deserializes it to the correct type.

What I would like to know is if there is a better way of doing this? It seems like it should be a fairly common problem and so there must be a more trivial solution, unless I'm already doing it the trivial way.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 66

Answers (1)

Jean Davy
Jean Davy

Reputation: 2240

I have read again carefully your question, and now I do not understand what is your problem, you say Currently I have a system where I prepend a string which distinguishes a certain type of message. My message is then sent through my own message parser class where it determines the type, and deserializes it to the correct type.
Looks OK, you may reduce the size of your message with my answer below horizontal line but the principle stays identical.

This the right way for asynchronous communication, but if you do synchrone you know that when you send A message you will receive B answer, so you do not have to prepend with a string which distinguishes the message, but you have to take care not sending another message before having the answer from the previous ...
So if you know how is formatted the answer you do not need any identification bytes, for example you know that the first four bytes is an integer, then a float on eight bytes, etc ...

Use boost::serialization, typically you save your structures, even with pointers, within a dumb bytes buffer, send that buffer over your network, and the other side de-serialize.

This example shows how Boost.Serialization can be used with asio to encode and decode structures for transmission over a socket. Even if it is using boost::asio you could extract only the serialization part easily.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions