Looking for Steam P2P network library replacement

Networking and Multiplayer Programming

Started by naas September 05, 2014 03:36 PM

4 comments, last by jessebright 9 years, 6 months ago

125

Author

September 05, 2014 03:36 PM

Currently Awesomenauts uses the Steam p2p library for networking. This works well in general but there are some negative aspects to it. There is limited control: We can't choose which ports to use, or customize QOS settings. Steam also adds 20 bytes (on top of udp and ip) to each packet that is sent. We've done many bandwidth optimizations and getting rid of these 20 bytes is getting more and more significant. These are the reasons we are looking for an other network library. And I'd like to get some advice on this topic

The Steam networking API is build on top of libjingje so we could just use that.

It supports NAT punching just like the Steam API.

We can choose which ports to use, which is good for players with routers that don't have UPNP.

We'll lose the 20 bytes steam overhead per packet.

We can access the QOS (DSCP) setting.

This seems to be a good choice. But is it? I'd like to hear about other developers experiences with libjingle in games, and also with other networking libraries.

hplus0603

11,916

September 05, 2014 04:32 PM

Another library you could look at is RakNet. It recently was opensourced after it was bought by Oculus/Facebook.

Are you sure Steam uses Jingle? XMPP is quite verbose.

Checking the web, it seems it only uses Jingle for the NAT punching part: https://partner.steamgames.com/documentation/api

enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };

danial32

101

September 08, 2014 05:09 AM

Well, libjingle API is just a NAT punching library where you can choose the route. XMPP can help you to deliver the multimedia effectively.

Android Developer

naas

125

Author

September 08, 2014 08:09 AM

Thanks for the replies, Ah I see, I read the steam documentation wrong. RakNet seems to be a great library, but it's quite expensive especially for multiplatform releases. It offers a lot but we don't need so much. We only need to send unreliable messages, because we already have our own reliability and all kinds of other stuff implemented. And we need NAT punching. So I guess RakNet is a bit overkill. I think we could use libjingle for the natpunching and poco for the networking. We already use poco for sending http requests to our server.

hplus0603

11,916

September 08, 2014 03:36 PM

RakNet seems to be a great library, but it's quite expensive especially for multiplatform releases

Facebook/Oculus bought it (probably to get the developer as an employee) and open sourced it. It's now free!

enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };

jessebright

101

October 03, 2014 11:50 AM

At Hidden Path Entertainment we often use Enet.

Off-the-shelf Enet offers sequenced, multi-channel, (optionally) reliable UDP packet delivery. The library is small, open source, and cross-platform. Documentation is lacking, but the code is easy enough to follow (adding support for the XboxOne's secure device addresses took me less than a day).

Please feel free to message me if you have any questions.

Looking for Steam P2P network library replacement

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Looking for Steam P2P network library replacement

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