<shameless plug> If anyone is interested, the Quake engine and variants have created a lot of documentation and tools. Since Quake represent early phases of the development of modern gaming systems, they are simple. As simple they can be. Many open source games can be studied, I suggest OpenArena because is easy available and fun. Modern games don't work standalone. They connect to a master server to find other gamers/active games. Heres a simple one: https://github.com/kphillisjr/dpmaster Example of use: http://dpmaster.deathmask.net/?game=openarena Another game that is interesting for networking, is SubSpace. The history with subspace is that was a commercial game that turned open source. It had already billing server, game server, master server. So is probably very similar to how many commercial games work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_%28video_game%29 http://wiki.minegoboom.com/index.php/Main_Page http://wiki.minegoboom.com/index.php/Category:Protocol It looks to me like somebody can learn stuff by reading this ones. </shameless plug>