Introduction to networking

There is so much to networking, a lot of which will help to know, but not help in development of an online RPG (at least not significantly), so we will only be looking at a few parts of networking, and for the most part, only skimming the surface of it. What we want to concentrate the most on is common types of network protocols (TCP and UDP) used for online games, along with the structure of packets. While doing my research, this is the information I found the hardest to find - there are so many biased opinions, along with needlessly complex articles, so it is often hard to find the cold facts without tons of digging around.

When I refer to networking, I am talking about the connection of two or more computers, whether it is through LAN, the internet, or whatever - as long as those two computers can "talk" to each other. How these computer "talk" to each other is through packets, which is a list of data with a specific meaning. How this data is handled is completely dependant on how the program receiving it is designed to handle it. You can send the words "close" to a client over and over, but the client wont do anything unless it is programmed to handle that exact phrase.

Packet data is sent in the form of binary, and is easiest to handle them with byte arrays. Each packet contains a header, which varies depending on the network protocol. All you really need to know is that this header takes up bandwidth, a lot of bandwidth. More on this is covered in the section 3-iii. After the header is the data of the packet, which is the information you send in the packet. Finally, theres sockets, which are used to handle the transferring of packets between computers.