Oculus VR announce acquisition and open sourcing of RakNet networking library

Today Oculus announced they have acquired RakNet and immediately released it under a modified BSD open source license.  The code is already available on their Github repository.  If you’ve never heard of it, RakNet is a low level C++ networking engine providing features like object replication, voice chat and patching.  A number of engines such as Unity and Havok already license RakNet and it has been used in hundreds of games.

 

From the Oculus Press release:

Oculus Acquires & Open Sources RakNet

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve acquired RakNet, one of the leading networking middleware systems in the games industry. We open-sourced it starting today under a modified BSD license (the same license Facebook uses for its open source projects) from the Oculus GitHub repo:https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet.

For those unfamiliar with RakNet, it is a comprehensive C++ game networking engine designed for ease of use and performance. The tech is tuned for cross-platform, high-performance applications that operate across a wide variety of network types. Key features include object replication, remote procedure calls, patching, secure connections, voice chat, and real-time SQL logging. The technology has been licensed by thousands of indie developers, as well as companies like Unity, Havok, Mojang, Maxis and Sony Online Entertainment.

We’ve known Kevin Jenkins, founder of Jenkins Software and lead engineer on RakNet, for years, and we’ve used RakNet internally at Oculus for various networked systems and tools. After working with Kevin for a few months, we were all excited by the idea of open-sourcing RakNet to the community.

If you’re interested in checking out (or forking) RakNet, head over to the Oculus GitHub repo athttps://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet. We’re looking forward to seeing where the community takes the project next!

 

 

Pretty awesome news.  Perhaps the sale to Facebook wasn’t so terrible after all?


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