This is the most boring screengrab in the world. I apologise.
Let’s see if I can get through a tech-heavy news post without making any glaring errors, shall we? Yes, let’s. In the latest Oculus VR move, the company has acquired RakNet and made it open source under a “modified” BSD license.
RakNet is a “middleware” networking engine, previously popular with indie developers because the license was free up to the point where a game had earned $100,000 USD in revenue. It was recently used in the Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod, so we know its ability to spawn hundreds of Rico Rodriguez’ at once is not in question.
The program is now open source and available through Oculus VR’s GitHub page. While RakNet had previously been free (up to a point,) making it open source presumably means that interested parties can also mess about with the code to their heart’s content.
In the announcement, the Oculus team say they’ve known RakNet creator Kevin Jenkins “for years” and have used the networking engine at Oculus on a number of internal projects. Oculus has been working with Jenkins “for a few months,” so this acquisition all seems fairly amicable.
So, if you’re on the look-out for “a comprehensive C++ game networking engine designed for ease of use and performance” which can do “cross-platform, high-performance applications that operate across a wide variety of network types” as well as “object replication, remote procedure calls, patching, secure connections, voice chat, and real-time SQL logging,” then you know where to get one.
