Hi everybody,

I am beginning a new (game) project, and I'm using both Allegro and network communication for the first time. The documentation of Allegro is easy and complete so I have a good time using it, but I still have just notions of how a network works (I am still learning about what sockets are exactly).

I am now at the point where I need the game client to retrieve data such as position of players sent from a server.
So, as in my main loop I am waiting for an event, using :
al_wait_for_event(ALLEGRO_EVENT_QUEUE, ALLEGRO_EVENT*);
and as this function "freezes" the program, I can't call such things as 'recv' or 'recvfrom' to process the data I should receive,
I imagined I could create an user event which would be emitted whenever data was retrieved.

Sadly, I couldn't find a similar question or an example about events and network, so I am referring to your wisdom.

My questions are :
- Is it the "proper way" to handle data communication over a network ?
- if not, what method should I use ?
- if yes, how do I have to "emit" my event ? (do I have to use multithreading (which I have never used either) ? Is there a way to "overload" the al_wait_for_event function ?)

I apologize if the terms I used aren't exact (I hope it's still understandable).

Thanks in advance for your answers.

edit : I omitted to mention I wish to use only C language (so no objects).

If you don't feel comfortable making your networking code feed an allegro event queue, you can use al_wait_for_event_timed or al_get_next_event, and handle your own waiting.

Thanks for your reply,
The fact is I have no idea what method to use, as both creating my own waiting loop and using the threading seems it can work.
Anyway, I'll stick to using al_wait_for_event and create an ALLEGRO_THREAD, I'm not sure how to create a loop that wakes the program up only if an event is sent or a message is received.

Is there any project to one day support network communications and sockets as a part of Allegro (either as an addon or in the core) ?

If you go the thread route, you can send your own custom messages to your main loop's event queue to wake it up and handle whatever you need to handle. (see: al_init_user_event_source and al_emit_user_event)

event queue's will wake al_wait_for_event up when they get an event, no matter who sends the event.