Playing Games with Friends - Learning Windows 8 Game Development - page 187

These benefits come with a downside, though. There is an overhead associated with
resending and reordering packets, which in the fast-paced game world can lead to
issues in keeping two players in sync. If you aren't sending a lot of data then this isn't
a big deal, and if your game doesn't require a new world state all the time then you
could use this without worrying too much. If, however, you are writing a fast-paced
game such as a first-person shooter that requires a constant stream of updates, you
might want to consider using UDP instead.
To make use of this socket, you can either establish the connection yourself, or if
you are using the PeerFinder class, the ConnectAsync() method will give you a
connected StreamSocket that you can use in your game. Let's quickly take a look
at how to create a StreamSocket manually.
There are two parts to a TCP connection: listener and socket . You should use the
listener to wait and listen for an incoming connection, and then respond to that con-
nection using a StreamSocket . This is defined in the following piece of code:
StreamSocketListener^ listener = ref new
StreamSocketListener();
listener->ConnectionReceived += ref new
TypedEventHandler<StreamSocketListener^,
StreamSocketListenerConnectionReceivedEventArgs^>(this,
&MyClass::HandleConnection);
listener->BindServiceNameAsync("6000");
For the server, we will start by creating a StreamSocketListener . This handles
waiting for a connection and, if one occurs, the ConnectionReceived event is
raised, which we hooked into earlier.
Once we have hooked into the ConnectionReceived event we can tell the listener
to start listening, which we do using the BindServiceNameAsync() method. This
method takes a string which in most cases will just specify a port number to listen
on as shown earlier. Remember that this is the WinRT Platform::String rather
than the standard library string, so ensure you're providing the correct one.
When a connection arrives, our handler will be called and we will be provided with
a StreamSocketListenerConnectionReceivedEventArgs object. Inside this