Open Source & Cross Platform Multiplayer/Networking Libraries?

Question

While raknet seems fairly interesting and really appealing from a feature-point of view, its licensing terms seem to be possibly troublesome for GPL'ed projects that may be leveraged commercially, something which is explicitly forbidden by the terms of the creative commons license.

While there's also opentnl, it doesn't seem to be as actively maintained anymore nowadays, in fact downloading the latest stable tarball even fails during compilation because it doesn't seem to support gcc >= 3.0 (?)

Of course, there's still also enet, but this one cannot be really compared to the abstract features that are supported by raknet/opentnl.

So, apart from any non-trivial dependencies such as ACE, Boost or Poco, are there any viable alternatives for embedding a fairly compact, well-maintained UDP-networking library?

Thanks

Answer 1

http://www.alhem.net/Sockets/

Answer 2

The wiki of Ogre3D provides a list of networking libraries and a short description for them.

Answer 3

Unfortunately network programming tends to be non-trivial.

Said that you would be advised to get aquainted with the network programming facilities from either Boost or ACE, as both are mature libraries that have been successfully employed in many applications.

I would also suggest to read C++ Network Programming: Mastering Complexity Using ACE and Patterns and C++ Network Programming: Systematic Reuse with ACE and Frameworks

Answer 4

Though this answer comes late to the party, I'm using OpenTNL for my game, Bitfighter, and I really like it. I use it on OS X, Windows, and Linux without a hitch. True, it's not maintained by its creator, but when I get the time, I'm going to create a new SourceForge project for it so people have a place to post their patches. It's stable and (fairly) well documented, so I would recommend giving it another look.

Answer 5

I have been looking for something very similar, but to no avail. So, I decided to create my own C++ Networking Library, at the time of this writing it isn't complete, but will be very soon. I will keep you up to date if your interested in trying it out. It's features so far are TCP/UDP, IPv4, IPv6 Async/Sync and multicasting. If there are any other features you have in mind that should be implemented, just let me know :)