quote: >I am curious, does Microsoft plan DirectPlay support under other operating >systems? Admittedly it''d be a bit odd being it DirectX is a Windows thing, >but if one wants to have a game server it helps to make it usable amongst >different platforms.. This is a tough question to answer, and there are various positions on it internally. The idea has been considered, but the current size of the team currently favors an approach of publishing and/or possibly licensing our network protocol so that others could write their own non-Windows platform code to interoperate with it. That of course would come with the headache of making sure that future versions continue to interoperate and would open DirectPlay to application compatibility problems that wouldn''t be fun for any of us. As far as I know no decision has yet been made as to what to do in this area. As it turns out most developers don''t seem to actually be writing a game that needs to span multiple platforms. In general most games don''t seem to cross the desktop/console line so a Playstation 2 port wouldn''t make a lot of sense. Xbox will support DirectPlay as an API, but they have there own plans as far as when and how to allow interoperability. A linux port is of course extremely unlikely, leaving a Mac port to be the only one that would seriously be worth considering. It doesn''t seem in my experience that a lot of games are targeting both PC and Mac anymore, so even that would be a hard business case to justify. I''m interested in hearing any thoughts you have in this area. James