RakNet

I was just saying to people interested in games, it is good to get a base level to advanced guide to every part including rendering, networking, gameplay etc that is a good source built from experience and explains things clearly. Yours looks like a great source for networking as well, thanks for adding it. I see you reference Gaffer on Games and the Valve Latency Compensation article, both are great for understanding game networking and helped me greatly in shipped titles especially prior to Unity/Unreal using stuff like enet [2]/RakNet [3]/custom. Lots of networking libs inherited the best from those like reliable UDP, channels and dealing with NAT. Both are excellent libraries to help understand the full picture and get started. Lots of game engines networking libs are based on those. [1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Laten

I have no idea but another case is RakNet (another Facebook property, via Occulus). It even uses the older, more controversial wording: https://github.com/facebookarchive/RakNet/blob/master/PATENT... And I'd find it highly unlikely it contains any patents too. Occulus was bought in March 2014 by Facebook and RakNet was bought in April 2014 by Occulus and there is only a handful of commits on GitHub that don't seem substantial at all and are just maintenance and cleaning up the repo. RakNet operated for years before that so it's unlikely they happen to have had a patent in it at the time of its purchase or they'd be nuked by Facebook before. Then again, there are/were patents for some bit tricks and Carmack's Reverse so anything is possible.

I'm neither and English isn't my first language (not that legalese is even close to any sane kind of English from last 200 years..) but due to my deep interest in Free and Open software, old games reimplementations, abandonware, reverse engineers and emulation I spent quite a while reading about legal stuff. The part you said is important sounds like you lose the right to use the patent in the given software if you attempt to sue someone over patents in that software which sounds absolutely sane. In facebook's case they terminate the patent grant given to you for you trying to sue them for any patent, except a counterclaim if they sue first: https://github.com/facebook/react/commit/b8ba8c83f318b84e429... And even that is just few years ago, RakNet that Facebook owns via Occulus is still using the old wording: https://github.com/facebookar

RakNet does that too (it's owned by Facebook via Occulus for a while now, Facebook bought Occulus then Occulus bought RakNet): https://github.com/facebookarchive/RakNet/blob/master/PATENT... Is this widespread at all or is it just Facebook..? Edit: I'm glad to be downvoted for asking a genuine fucking question if anyone else does this since Apache mentions Facebook and the only place I ran into PATENTS file is another Facebook property and googling brings nothing up except more React..

True but you can create a reliable UDP implementation and get the same TCP features you need (resending/ordering/ACK). Many games use UDP and then some form of reliable UDP where important messages are ACK'd (game start, game end, global events etc).[1] Almost every multiplayer game I have worked on has a flavor of this, where there is a bit or flag on important messages that need reliable tracking over UDP. Everything else is just broadcast like player positions, local action and more where packets can be missed and extrapolated/interpolated, predictive methods and lag compensation. There can also be some packet loss increase when using TCP mixed with UDP[2]. Most games built recently probably use more RUDP than TCP. But when you need to use any UDP at all you may as well just go reliable UDP. TCP definitely works for non-realtime game

For the best of both before SCTP exists, if ever, RUDP (Reliable UDP) [1] where needed is what most game developers/engines use on the networking layer such as RakNet [2] (recently bought and open sourced by Oculus), enet [3], and the many based on those. RUDP or similar systems allow network messaging to ack when needed and unreliable by default which is fine for positional updates with some missing data using interpolation and extrapolation to simulate missing data. Global game states and determining the winner/ending the level might need a reliable call. With UDP and only some reliable calls you drastically improve real-time performance with less queueing. TCP is ok for turn-based or near-real-time but high action real-time games almost all use UDP with a RUDP twist. Using a mix can also be harmful [4] so the best option is RUDP where

I wonder why they didn't include the commit history in the RakNet repository though - https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet