Thank you.

It turns out there were a few other quirks in the read/write code and client side activity, but everything is working now.

All, or nearly all, C functions are part of C++.

Anyway, strtok appears to be a c function from the string library.
Both the c declaration
#include "string.h"

and the c++ style declaration
#included <cstring>

may be used as header declaration to use it.

Easy, if you understand pointers.

My personal favorite method is string tokenizer, strtok. I usually use it for parsing .csv files, but you can modify that to accept just about any data separator.

Storing the data into an array isn't done automaticaly by strtok, but would only take a few extra lines of code.

Thanks for the tip and the vote of confidence. I hadn't heard of Unity3D before, and as first impression go I'm both impressed... and a bit worried that is too much overkill.

I'm not exactly a savvy C# coder. I'm more of a savvy C/C++ coder who is using this game project to force myself to learn C#, which I keep hearing is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Further, coming from a low-level C background the idea of high-level graphic model design and rendering is a little intimidating. To me, coding a simple physics engine sounds easier, which is what we might be doing anyway. We're writing a space 4x game where the smallest objects tracked are meter wide missiles that could be billions of km apart. I'm not sure how well Unity could handle those scales, and the idea of using a full game engine like Unity3D only for graphic rendering feels a little silly.

Still, I'm relieved to know that we at least have a cross-platform 3D option to consider.

Maybe.

We've shown you an if-then branch, and an if-else branch.

The proper branch, combined with some form of minimum-time filtering, is exactly what you want. The wrong branch could quickly give you a 10,000 KB+ file. Choose wisely.