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This took me a while to track down. I figured I'd document it for posterity, and anyone else trying to do asynchronous networking in C++ using boost::asio. I'm using Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS with gcc/g++, which uses boost version 1.40. The reason is that the "bytes transferred" argument to the callback is the number of bytes until the separator is found, but more bytes than that are decoded from the socket into the input stream.

I recently answered question on the gamedev.net multiplayer and networking forum, that I feel warrants further distribution. The question dealt with trying to use MySQL eventing and MySQL data as the "server" for a large-scale multi-player web-based game.

I've heard the requests, and decided that they are right: It's better to release something that probably works for Xbox for XNA 4.0 now, and then follow up with the Phone version later.

Now and then, someone will say "hey, I want to write a MUD (or some other text-based program), and I want the text to be in color -- how do I do this?"

The answer actually requires a little bit of understanding of pre-Internet computer arcana, so here we go:

XNA Game Studio makes it possible to write games for the Xbox without being a developer with good publisher contacts and lots of money to pay for marketing and Xbox development kits. This is great!

However, because the XNA Indie Games system is not fully controlled by Microsoft, certain features of Xbox Live! are not available, because they would be too easily abused. These features include online Leaderboards, and unlockable Achievements.

The XNA community has developed alternatives to those functions. Many XNA games contain "Awardments" that can be unlocked, and many more XNA games use the XNA Network Highscores component to implement distributed, peer-to-peer highscore sharing. The name for this is generally "Online Highscores" rather than "Leaderboards," because the latter name is reserved for use by Microsoft-certified titles that use the real Xbox Live! functionality.

This article introduces version 2 of the XNA Online highscores component, which is free for you to use in your own game under the terms of the MIT license.

Recently, a question came up about how to structure a client/server networked game where users can host games that other users can join. I think I did a reasonably concise write-up of a common-sense approach that's been successful for many years, so I'm archiving it here for posterity:

VMWare workstation is in many ways a great product. It allows you to do all kinds of nifty set-ups that let multiple virtual machines talk to each other and the rest of the world, within the confines of your local PC.

However, there are some problems with it. I have a couple of virtual machines that I use as a sandbox for developing networked applications at work. These are hosted inside a Dell Inspiron XPS 1330 laptop. The laptop travels between networks frequently. At work, it's usually plugged in, but sometimes gets un-plugged and goes on wireless-G. On the train, it goes on a Sprint WAN card. At home, it generally goes on another wireless-G network.

I used to do serialization using all kinds of fancy templates and macros. You can create pretty elegant systems that way. However, at some point, simplicity should win out. Here's a system that might work just fine for you:

A simple packet class, which really is all you need:

class packet {
public:
  packet() : pos_(0) {}
  void append(void const *data, size_t size) {

I recently have answered several questions about how to structure a networking library such that it can be easy to use for users of the library and/or when expanding the game you're writing. Here are some thoughts on that. (Code examples in C++)

Networking generally ends up needing to do three things:

1) Mirror state updates from one object to another.
2) Request remote services ("RPC").