An application can use two methods to process DirectPlay messages. The first is to check the receive queue during the main loop of the application. Typically, this means the application is single threaded.
Alternatively, an application can have a separate thread to wait for messages and process them. In this case the application should supply a non-NULL auto-reset synchronization event handle (see the Win32 CreateEvent API) when it creates players. DirectPlay will set this event whenever a message arrives for that player. All the local players in an application can share the same event or each can have his or her own event.
The message processing thread should then use the Win32 WaitForSingleObject API to wait until the event is set. Keep calling Receive until there are no more messages in the message queue.