RakNet networking middleware now open source

[Floh]

RakNet has been aquired by OculusVR and is now on github under an open source license:

https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet

The low-level feature set is similar to ENET (guaranteed messaging over UDP), but it also has a number of higher level features (voice chat, object replication, RPC, etc...). We're using RakNet for 5 years now and it is a solid and low-overhead messaging library, it's also used in many other game projects, and as far as I know it is also the networking layer in the Unity engine.

The most exciting thing to me is that open-sourcing the lib could enable an emscripten port (there is already a Native Client port which probably could be used as a starting point).

It's probably also a good idea to create a "RakNet lite" which doesn't have all the high-level bells'n'whistles (connection management and messaging are the really important features imho).

Cheers,

-Floh.

[Alon Zakai]

Interesting!

This should just work if it uses async unix sockets, hopefully that's the case. I wonder why they needed to port to NaCl? I guess because they have their own APIs for everything?

- Alon

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[Floh]

Yes, NaCl has separate socket wrapper classes (PP::UDPSocket etc...) and doesn't try to emulate the common socket API (unless that's changed recently).

It looks like RakNet has a socket wrapper class which handles platform specifics (see RakNetSocket2_XXX: https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet/tree/master/Source), and I know that there's at least one thread which does the send/recv for open connections (search for UpdateNetworkLoop and RakThread: https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet/blob/master/Source/RakPeer.cpp) but the important threaded stuff seems to be isolated in a RakPeer::RunUpdateCycle() call (the thread just calls this repeatedly), and I seem to remember that in my last support mail thread with Kevin Jenkins he mentioned a way to run the update loop without threading but I need to dig this out from my mail archives.

-Floh.

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[Lindsey Tropf]

Amazingly late 6-years-later inquiry: Do you have any updates on this? "I seem to remember that in my last support mail thread with Kevin Jenkins he mentioned a way to run the update loop without threading"

My developers are having some struggles with RakNet > Emscripten due to the multithreading.

[Floh]

It looks like RakNet is long dead unfortunately (https://github.com/facebookarchive/RakNet).

[Lindsey Tropf]

Of course we started building with it in 2015.  Time to rebuild everything, I guess!  😬