Im working on an experimental server/client game and I was wondering how can I switch my winsock tcp/ip code to a thread, instead of in the main window itself? I have read an article on threads here on gamedev. But I basically dont know how to pass the info from the thread to my main loop. Example. Player 1 said "text" "text" is send to server server sends "text" to all logged users. Player 2 gets "text" on separate thread "text" is send to ????

I was thinking of a solution whereby you call the main thread with a user message notifying it that a message has arrived as suggested by magmai :p

or you can poll a global variable.

when you share a variable between two threads (read/write of data/flags/pointers), you should use mutex''s - so that the two threads don''t try to access the variable at the same time.

Wyzfen

I''ve done chat servers via the following:

* give each connection a send queue (or even better a deque)
* if one connection wants to send stuff to another it gets appended to the queue
* the socket-handler code is in charge of checking its own queue and dequing/sending messages when appropriate

Basically, the connection data list is global somehow... or you could make the connection list a static member of the connection class. I actually have a fairly generic set of server code written but it only works using IOCP right now and it needs fleshing out before I''d make it available.