Beginning iOS Game Center and Game Kit: For iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Formatting Messages

Whenever you are dealing with designing a network for a game or game-like application, you are guaranteed to be dealing with at least two types of messages. These are often referred to as state messages and server messages. A state message is a message that will directly affect your game engine, such as a player moving or opening a chest. Server messages deal with the glue that holds everything together, such as connections, disconnections, pings, and errors.

It becomes important to quickly sort these messages to different handlers. It is a good design pattern to keep the parsing of these messages in different places. After all, you don't want to be scanning all your chat messages in a first-person shooter for client timeout ...