How do you use sockets to send / receive data without waiting. I have a very basic knowledge of networking, and I can now finially send and receive data...but I have to wait for the data. This works fine in a turn based game, but what about real time gaming? I've never dealt with multi threading before...and all of my windows programming uses allegro and is all single threaded using lock step processing. I've looked at libnet...but can't get it to compile with my program. I keep getting link errors about default libs...and when I ignore default libs...even more link errors. So...I've just started playing with WinSock. Also...how to keep from waiting for a client to join, or at least allow for additional processing to happen while I wait for a client. And what about if you run client before server...you get an error! How do you correct this? I can't guarranty that the server will always be ran first!

I've included the (crappy) source for the client and server below:
Server:

Client:

Thanks in advance.

Check this (the whole thread is interesting too). You have two ways, marking the socket as asynchronic or using select to multiplex the socket.

This is how I do it:

    int blockParam = 1;//used to specify a non-blocking socket

    if (ioctlsocket(winSocket, FIONBIO, (u_long FAR*)&blockParam) != 0)
      // use WSAGetLastError() to figure out what went wrong
    else
     //it's all good

And now you need to check if your send or receive would have blocked, and distinguish that case from "real" errors.

  result = send(winSocket, (char*)message, messageSize, 0);

  if (result == SOCKET_ERROR)
  {
    winsockCode = WSAGetLastError();

    if ((winsockCode != WSAEWOULDBLOCK) && (winsockCode != WSAENOBUFS))
      //we hit some socket error, probably best to close the socket
    else
      //couldn't send anything this time, try again later
  }//if result

    result = recv(winSocket, (char*)buffer, dyBufferSize, 0);

    if (result == SOCKET_ERROR)
    {
      winsockCode = WSAGetLastError();

      if ((winsockCode != WSAEWOULDBLOCK) && (winsockCode != WSAEMSGSIZE))
        //hit an error
      else
        //just need to wait, nothing received this time
    }//if result

yes.
when a socket that is listening is marked as "readable" by select a new connection attempt was made - check out the msdn winsock page

Thanks! That's kinda what I thought...just wanted to make sure that if I tried it...it was my fault if I did it wrong! Also...in the above code sample, you MUST start the server first...is there a way around that? Like I said, I can't always guarranty that a server will be ran first. One more thing...I've noticed that when I use select as below, I get a timeout error and then it seems that it doesn't reset itself to try again. Is there some way to reset it to check for more data (I'm sure there is)? Sorry...one last question for now...this pertains to the below code example as well...I'm I using select correctly? Or should this be seperate from the main loop? It seems that it needs to be polled in the main loop, but I am not for certain.

Thanks again all...