DirectPlay is part of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

. It is a network communication library intended for computer game development, although it can be used for other purposes. DirectPlay is a high-level software interface between applications and communication services that allows games to be connected over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, a

modem The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...

link, or a network. It features a set of tools that allow players to find game sessions and sites to manage the flow of information between hosts and players. It provides a way for applications to communicate with each other, regardless of the underlying online service or protocol. It also resolves many connectivity issues, such as

Network Address Translation Network address translation (NAT) is a method of mapping an IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic Router (computing), routing device. The te ...

(NAT). Like the rest of DirectX, DirectPlay runs in COM and is accessed through

component object model Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface technology for software components from Microsoft that enables using objects in a language-neutral way between different programming languages, programming contexts, processes and machines ...

(COM)

interfaces Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics'' * '' Inter ...

. By default, DirectPlay uses multi-threaded programming techniques and requires careful thought to avoid the usual threading issues. Since DirectX version 9, this issue can be alleviated at the expense of efficiency.

Networking

DirectPlay is built on the

User Datagram Protocol In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in Network packet, packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protoco ...

(UDP) to allow it speedy communication with other DirectPlay applications. It uses TCP and UDP ports 2300 to 2400 and 47624.

Interfaces

*The primary interfaces (methods of access) for DirectPlay are: **IDirectPlay8Server, which allows access to server functionality **IDirectPlay8Client, which allows access to client functionality **IDirectPlay8Peer, which allows access to

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

functionality *Secondary interfaces are: ** Various lobby interfaces that allows players to find and prepare a game before it actually commences. ** Thread management interfaces that allows the programmer to fine-tune resource usage. This also allows for a general disabling of worker threads so that tricky multi-threaded issues are avoided at the cost of decreased responsiveness. ** Various

network address translation Network address translation (NAT) is a method of mapping an IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic Router (computing), routing device. The te ...

(NAT) interfaces that make it easier for players behind routers to host games. Most players on

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

internet connections face this problem. ** Various voice communication interfaces known as ''DirectPlay Voice'' that make it easier to support audio communication and voice input in games. ** Various queue monitoring interfaces that allow the application to get feedback on how much data has been sent and received as requested. This allows an application to decrease/increase the amount of data sent in accordance with the capabilities of the receiver.

DirectPlay Voice

DirectPlay Voice was introduced in

Windows Me Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...

as part of DirectX 7.1 for multiplayer games. It is a voice communications, recording and playback API that allows gamers to use voice chat in games written to take advantage of the API, through a DirectPlay network transport session itself.

Current status

DirectPlay was traditionally one of the components of DirectX that received less attention, but for DirectX version 8 it received a major overhaul and became a relatively lightweight networking library. However, as part of Microsoft's unveiling of XNA in 2004, Microsoft announced that DirectPlay would be deprecated in favor of

Games for Windows - Live A game is a structured type of play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or video games) or art ...

technology already available on

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of four main home video game console lines, as well as application software, applications (games), the streaming media, streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox networ ...

and being ported for use on

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

PCs. DirectPlay was supported in DirectX DLLs for the lifetime of Microsoft Windows XP. However, starting from the autumn of 2007, the headers and libraries — vital components if developers wanted to develop new programs utilizing the technology — were removed from the DirectX SDK. In

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

, DirectPlay has been deprecated and DirectPlay Voice and DirectPlay's NAT Helper have been removed. In

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

, DirectPlay is fully deprecated, and modern game development has transitioned to more current technologies like Xbox Live and other networking APIs.

References

External links