Not strictly BMAX since we have built these functions into our own dll.
1) Polling the connection will automatically open it even if you are not pinging a host. If there is no network connection at all (no modem or NIC installed then the dll function will return False). Initialising the dll will either open the connection (return True) or return False.
2) Downloading a complete file could be problematic for the reasons you mentioned, you would either need to stall the program execution whilst you attempted to pull the complete file or (and I am assuming you are talking downloading question files) read them from a database using an SQL query and read the responses into a buffer. When the server response is complete transfer them into the game. The latter can be done in the background and the player could continue to play the game whilst you are checking for and downloading new questions. We do exactly that in the dll for downloading highscores - in reality you could be downloading any information just by altering the script.
We are not due to release yet but drop me a line if you wanna pre-release test it, I could get you something in a couple of days :D
1) Polling the connection will automatically open it even if you are not pinging a host. If there is no network connection at all (no modem or NIC installed then the dll function will return False). Initialising the dll will either open the connection (return True) or return False.
2) Downloading a complete file could be problematic for the reasons you mentioned, you would either need to stall the program execution whilst you attempted to pull the complete file or (and I am assuming you are talking downloading question files) read them from a database using an SQL query and read the responses into a buffer. When the server response is complete transfer them into the game. The latter can be done in the background and the player could continue to play the game whilst you are checking for and downloading new questions. We do exactly that in the dll for downloading highscores - in reality you could be downloading any information just by altering the script.
We are not due to release yet but drop me a line if you wanna pre-release test it, I could get you something in a couple of days :D