I'm making a game which have strong basic design based on multiplayer but also should provide a really interesting and self-sufficient solo game. A bit like a real-time strategy game. The events and actions taken shouldn't be as massive and immediate as in a FPS, so you can also think the networking like for an RTS. It's a PC game, targetting Windows, MacOSX and Linux (Ubuntu & Fedora). It's programmed in C++, using a variety of open source libraries, so I have great (potential) control over the performances.

So far I always considered that just making the game work with two applications, client & server, even in solo mode was ok.

However, as I'm in the process of starting the network code I'm having doubts about if it's a good idea. I'm not a specialist so I might be missing something in my analysis.

I see these pros and cons:

Pros:

• The game works only one way so if I fix a bug it should apply on all game modes, whatever the distance with the server is;
• Basic networking issues would be detected early, including behaviour with the protection softwares (firewall) installed (i am not specialist so this might be wrong);

Cons:

• I suppose that even if it should be really fast enough, networking client and server on the same computer would still be slower than no networking and message passing in (one) process memory.
• Maybe debugging would be more difficult? I don't have experience in this case but so far I assume that debugging with Visual Studio allows me to debug multiple process so it shouldn't be really different. Also, remote debugging.

My question is: is there a big disadvantage that I missed? Or maybe there are advantages that I missed and that should encourage me to just continue with only client-server game sessions?