Early Stages of Networking and Multiplayer

It's been awhile since the last update to the blog and that's because I've been doing a lot of reading and research into game networking, specifically for XNA and XBL. Unfortunately, I've read a lot of negativity regarding it. Though I don't know if it's all true, some say there's not a big audience to play multiplayer games on XBL indie games. About a month ago, we decided we want to make this game a multiplayer only game. But, if there's not a big enough audience for it, we may have to reconsider making it a single player game, perhaps with some multiplayer options. I will have to try some multiplayer indie games and see for myself. I also read that game networking is a major hassle in general, and specifically so with XBL because of the packet overhead added with voice chat and XNA. Not that I'm complaining, XNA makes it super easy to at least use its networking features. It's just that I will face some challenges in making it run smoothly over XBL, especially with the physics engine. I'm already facing some animation issues with my regular characters (not using the physics engine) just over system link in my testing. Right now, I have the ability to host and join system link games working and you can play 2 linked computers together (xbox and PC, or PC and PC) moving the characters about freely. It's a lot of work and a good start, but there's still a lot more to do and improve. I'm going to keep experimenting and also read up on network prediction and smoothing algorithms. Hopefully I will be able to improve the animations and get the physics working decently over the network. Check out the video below, see the two little yellow dots on the minimap?