yo im currently working on a Real TIme Strategy game simular to Populous 3 ( go here to see a screen shot (pictures section) http://www.strategyplanet.com/populous/popiso ) (if any of u have played it ul know what ive got ahead) ive used sockets before in other languages but only recently found out how to do it in c++, thats not the problem tho, at the moment each command is sent in a 10 byte packet using TCP for example unit selection would send [PACKETTYPE][TEAM][X][Y][WIDTH][HEIGHT] which normaly looks summin like "C£$%[];{Lk" now in this respect it works great and commanding like a thousand units to a place requires only about 20bytes of data to be sent, but the problem is the time delay it takes for the other player's exe to recieve the command and in which time the unit on thr pc will move say 10 milliseconds after the one on mine which causes a variance in position and thus the game is out of sync, i tried doing a frame by frame "PING" where unless all player's return the PING it will not continue with the game but this means that say the game is running at 40fps each ping is 10bytes which is sent and recieved, thus 1 ping = 20 bytes * frames = 800bytes per second per player (not including all the TCP header info) do u know of a better more 56k friendly method of sync? if so please mail back or any suggestions or ideas would be great.. and im sorry for posting in one great big lump of text but it probly reflects the way i code lol, thanx for ur time