I'm an absolute newbie in this field and I'm kind of frightened of heading down the wrong path of network programming. I'm trying to build a strong network library for my game engine.
I've looked online and have seen there is a network library with boost, I'd love to use that as I'm really keen on further integrating it with my codebase. But I'm wondering, how would I code and debug such a thing? If I only want to develop on one PC how can I emulate a network environment with a dedicated/peer server and x number of players connected to it?
You can simply start many processes on a single PC.. You can use networking locally (127.0.0.1). Or you can use Virtual Machines.