Valve Publishes The Source To Their Game Networking Sockets Library

A few days back we wrote about Valve to open-source their Steam networking sockets library and now that source code release has occurred.

The "GameNetworkingSockets" project is a network transport layer for games with a TCP-inspired but messages-based protocol designed for reliability, supports bandwidth estimation and encryption, and other features for use by modern games. This library has already been in use for some games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive while now Valve has made it open-source under a BSD license and has also made it not dependent upon Steam so that it can be used independently and is cross-platform.

The GameNetworkingSockets source drop occurred on Friday night and is cross-platform with currently having Microsoft Visual Studio build support and for Linux there is Meson build system support. The code should also support macOS, but its still being tidied up after being exported from Valve's internal toolchain. This networking library is dependent upon OpenSSL and Google Protobuf.

Among future improvements sought by GameNetworkingSockets are more reliability improvements, abstracting away the usage of "SteamIDs" to make it more generic, and reducing OpenSSL bloat.

This networking library comes in at roughly 55,000 lines of actual C++ code but about half of that is in the form of header files and is spread across over 150 files.

Developers wanting to check out this networking library can find it on GitHub.