Question

I’m creating a MMO game. I will be using TCP client/server communication. At first my approach was to write both client and server in C++, but now I’m starting to think if it wouldn’t be easier to write server in C#.

Client is going to be written in C++ because it needs to be cross-platform, but server will always be on Windows system. I consider choosing C# because it has an easier way of handling threads, built-in XML parser, etc.

My question is if it would be a good solution? Performance is still important to me, so if choosing C# over C++ would have a drastic influence on performance, I’d stick with C++.

Also if you think it’s good idea, do you know if there are any tutorials that present communication between C# server and C++ client?

Thanks in advance for answers.

Answer 1

Using different languages for client and server forces you to rewrite quite a bit of things in separate languages I would personally want to keep in sync:

• Serialization and deserialization, although you could of course use some library for that. Google Protocol Buffers come to my mind, as they are explicitly designed to save bandwith and work “cross language”.
• Almost every entity of your game will have a more or less common set of properties. When going with different languages, you would have to keep these in sync manually and probably write them twice. This is especially annoying with more complex setters 😉
• You will want to have some shared logic to “emulate” server answers on the client. Its important to predict on the client side what the server does to get a “snappy” behaviour. And what could emulate that behaviour better then using the same codebase for server and client?

I would’t see a great problem with performance when using C# on the server though. That shouldn’t be an aspect that strongly influences your decision.