As for weeding out code, I've tried to do this myself and it kinda works, but when I try to connect the game crashes. Singleplayer works fine though. (might as well make your own networking code as well I guess)
There's a basic actor and player with next to no code. It might be lacking something extremely important, but it could at least give you some pointers to where you should start.
*old link*see post below*old link*
It was based on some stripped down gamedll code from angryboids the crymono sample game. I just stripped it down further and tried to improve some code.