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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T22:19:36+00:00

I have a turn-based game in which two players may play against each others.

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I have a turn-based game in which two players may play against each others.

It’s written in C# and uses XNA 4.0.

Currently multiplayer is implemented with TCP/IP. It works pretty nicely, but only if the players are within the same network and one of them knows the IP of the other.

So the question is: How should I implemented the online play for this game? Is TCP a reasonable method for connecting two random players from the opposite sides of the world without them having to deal with IP addresses and ports(or any other such technical details)?

To make this problem more challenging, I have no server for hosting the game matching service. (Well, I have an access to a virtual web server which I could use for sharing the IPs.)

To list questions:

  • Does .NET offer better choice of communication method than TCP?
  • What would be the best way to deal with NATs in my case?
  • Is there a cheap way of getting my own server and run the TCP game matching service there?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    TCP vs UDP.

    TCP is a bit slower than UDP but more failsafe.

    Since your game is turn based it will probably send minimal amounts of data between the client and server and it is not really latency dependant, I would say you might aswell go for TCP.

    To make this problem more challenging, I have no server for hosting the game matching service. (Well, I have an access to a virtual web server which I could use for sharing the IPs.)

    If you are going to provide your players with a server browser or similar you will need to have a centralized server, a web server with a script/application built for this would do just fine.

    • Is there a cheap way of getting my own server and run the TCP game matching service there?

    A web server or similar host would do just fine and is usually cheap, what you want is:

    • Function for a server to add itself to the server list.
    • Function for a client to retrieve the servers on the list.

    Doing web requests with C# is no problem at all, the requests could look something like:

    http://www.example.com/addToServerList.php?name=MyEpicServer&ip=213.0.0.ABC (adds this server to the list)

    http://www.example.com/getOnlineServers.php (returns list of all the servers)

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