Announcing Oculus Connect, RakNet Open Source, and E3 2014 Awards | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Oculus Connect, RakNet Open Source, and E3 2014 Awards

oculusvr.com

52 pointsepsylon11 comments

RakNet's (http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/) low-level killer feature is a tweakable guaranteed-messaging-layer on top of UDP. One can send messages as unreliable-unordered, reliable-unordered, unreliable-ordered and reliable-ordered. Messages can be sent in ordering channels (messages in one channel are only ordered between each other, not with messages in other channels). ENET (http://enet.bespin.org/Features.html) has a similar low-level feature set, but lacks RakNet's high-level features as far as I know (replication RPC, voice etc).

Yeah I recently discovered enet through Emscripten (which emulates UDP on top of SCTP. SCTP is the protocol used by WebRTC and supports reliable and unreliable packets like enet and RakNet, though I believe Emscripten's UDP emulation only uses it in unreliable mode (since UDP is unreliable).

Apparently SCTP can be tunnelled over UDP if native support is unavailable (which seems very likely), which means I've ended up with the crazy stack of:

enet, which uses UDP which is emulated using SCTP which is tunnelled through UDP.

Crazy but it works. Bring on the real time web games!

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

There are some interesting issues already appearing on GitHub for this, buffer overflows and SQL injections. Hopefully open sourcing this should make it more secure as well as free to use.

I've been looking at networking libraries recently so this news has come at a good time.

Is it just me or does it feel like so far Oculus is doing pretty much everything right. It very well could just be the fanboy in me.

On a semi related note, the title really scared me before I saw the article. I thought 'Oculus Connect' was going to be some sort of Facebook Connect style social integration.

I don't think they're "doing pretty much everything right" but, then again, I'm not getting paid to say so.

Are you insinuating I am getting paid to? Sorry if it came off that way, I tried to acknowledge my fanboyism. It's mostly that I just have this believe that everything John Carmack touches turns to gold.

RakNet is pretty legit. It's very low level so it doesn't make making a networking multiplayer video game easy, but it does do a good job solving one critical component in doing so. Great move.

Looking forward to the Carmack and Abrash talks.

Does this mean the second dev kits are about to ship?

Yep. They announced a few days ago that the first DK2s are moving from manufacturing to distribution: https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1...

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