As a project we were tasked with working in pairs to emulate the 1985 game Spacewar in XNA. We had to maintain all of the core gameplay of Spacewar, although were were told to specifically not include a few aspects.

Overall, Lou and I did a pretty good job. My previous project in Networking already provided most of the core systems and elements needed to create the game. As such, within an hour or so of starting, we were quite far along.

One of the requirements the initially seemed like an obstacle was synchronizing “game mode” data across all clients. XNA doesn’t provide an interface for automatically synchronizing settings or options that are not directly related to the network session. As such, I had to use a bit field stored in a byte to transfer game mode related data from the server to the clients.

Lou’s blog: http://lounetworkingforgamesblog.blogspot.com/
Professor: http://prof.johnpile.com/