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

52 points by epsylon 12y ago

thefreeman 12y ago
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.
- infra178 12y ago
  I don't think they're "doing pretty much everything right" but, then again, I'm not getting paid to say so.
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    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.
flohofwoe 12y ago
RakNet's (http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/ 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 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).
- Timmmmbob 12y ago
  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!
- aeontech 12y ago
  I wonder why they didn't include the commit history in the RakNet repository though - https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet
  - michaelx386 12y ago
    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.
intruder 12y ago
Looking forward to the Carmack and Abrash talks.
taylorbuley 12y ago
Does this mean the second dev kits are about to ship?
- tking8924 12y ago
  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=10044 https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1...
forrestthewoods 12y ago
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.

52 points by epsylon 12y ago

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.

infra178 12y ago
I don't think they're "doing pretty much everything right" but, then again, I'm not getting paid to say so.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  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.

flohofwoe 12y ago

RakNet's (http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/ 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 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).

Timmmmbob 12y ago
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!
aeontech 12y ago
I wonder why they didn't include the commit history in the RakNet repository though - https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet
- michaelx386 12y ago
  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.

intruder 12y ago

Looking forward to the Carmack and Abrash talks.

taylorbuley 12y ago

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

tking8924 12y ago
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=10044 https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1...

forrestthewoods 12y ago

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.