Valve's GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 Released With Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve's GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 Released With Better Performance

One of Valve's many open-source projects is GameNetworkingSockets as a basic transport layer for games to handle UDP-based messaging, P2P networking, encryption, IPv6, and other network handling functionality of particular use to games / game engines...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GameNetworkingSockets-1.3

[microcode]

It'd be interesting to see, as QUIC matures, whether it suits this use case better over time; it's nice because it provides bulk vs. low latency, and reliable vs. unreliable all over one connection state that can migrate.

[Jabberwocky]

I did not know this lib existed. It's remarkable and even comes under 3 clause BSD licenese. I hope game (engine) designers will start using this.

Engines like Godot* can really use this as it's networking leaves a lot to be desired.

I hope we will see more bindings (or even implementations) as this lib becomes more known.

*Thanks to Calinou for pointing out that Godot already has similar but not identical features via ENet fork.

[dragorth]

It'd be interesting to see, as QUIC matures, whether it suits this use case better over time; it's nice because it provides bulk vs. low latency, and reliable vs. unreliable all over one connection state that can migrate.

It seems the lib is based on some of the QUIC ideas, according to its GitHub page.

[Calinou]

Engines like Godot can really use this as it's networking leaves a lot to be desired.

Godot uses a fork of ENet that supports IPv6, and encryption is supported via DTLS. I don't think the networking limitations are coming from the library, but rather from the lack of documentation.

[kpedersen]

It is also written very nicely and the build system is not some sprawling mess. The documentation is very nice too.

I actually just made an initial FreeBSD port.

[Jabberwocky]

Godot uses a fork of ENet that supports IPv6, and encryption is supported via DTLS. I don't think the networking limitations are coming from the library, but rather from the lack of documentation.

I did some testing based on Godot's master branch about a year ago. I did spend hours not days but still don't know how I missed this. I'm happy to see that I'm wrong. I apologize.

You're right about the documentation, I did not see this in the highlevel sections but after searching for it I found some API docs about it.

It still looks like GameNetworkingSockets is very different to ENet, both in terms of simplifying abstraction and also features like p2p. In the end it could still benifit from using it, but it might go against Godot's pholosophy or have too many tradeoffs so it makes sense if they/you don't want to use it. ENet seems like a nice basic solution.

I'll keep my eye on Enet/forks, Raknet (now that it's open) and GameNetworkingSockets going forward.

[Guest]

I did not know this lib existed. It's remarkable and even comes under 3 clause BSD licenese. I hope game (engine) designers will start using this.

Engines like Godot* can really use this as it's networking leaves a lot to be desired.

I hope we will see more bindings (or even implementations) as this lib becomes more known.

*Thanks to Calinou for pointing out that Godot already has similar but not identical features via ENet fork.

True. I wonder if something like Teeworlds can integrate this.