GameNetworkingSockets VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

Compare GameNetworkingSockets vs Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) and see what are their differences.

GameNetworkingSockets

Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption. (by ValveSoftware)

Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

.NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop. (by dotnet)
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GameNetworkingSockets Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)
35 273
7,830 21,556
1.4% 1.2%
8.1 9.9
about 1 month ago 3 days ago
C++ C#
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

GameNetworkingSockets

Posts with mentions or reviews of GameNetworkingSockets. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-11.
  • How are game servers financed
    1 project | /r/gamedev | 6 Dec 2023
    Steam does have a NAT traversal/punchthrough service too. It's apparently usable without Steam according to their README on https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets but honestly the only easy to use implementation I know is in Facepunch.Steamworks which requires a SteamID to initialize
  • Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
    3 projects | /r/gaming | 11 Jul 2023
    Halo was mostly all about single player and early multiplayer/local multiplayer but their online netcode has sucked since Blood Gulch. Lots of games do networking horribly, I have been in gamedev making networking and I hate most of what people do. The ones that have a clean natting, based on enet style reliable UDP channels, RakNet style punch are better (RakNet was good until Facebook bought it). It has come a long way but also fallen back. Valve source netcode (on github) is probably the best and you can check it out here. They started with the best in Quake networking, then to Source.
  • Steam is very good, but I do wish for more effort in the competition.
    1 project | /r/pcmasterrace | 16 Mar 2023
    There are some general APIs that are tied to Steam, like some networking stuff (even then there's an open source library), but the devs are not required to use any of those. If the devs chose to develop exclusively for steam and use their libraries, then that's their own decision.
  • I FIGURED OUT NETWORKING
    2 projects | /r/godot | 15 Mar 2023
    Keep in mind that if you do go the GodotSteam route, there's GameNetworkingSockets from valve that doesn't have the requirement of needing Steam that you can use for releasing on other platforms. It has the same interface as the Steamworks SDK without requiring the Steamworks SDK.
  • Peer to Peer online multiplayer?
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 18 Feb 2023
    Their UDP-but-connection-based game networking protocol can be used completely separetely from Steam (it also supports encryption). I think that does not include their relay networking solution, but still.. maybe it's helpful. They also have a TCP-like interface to make it easy to plug into an existing solution.
  • What kind of person do I need to find to get help with this issue?
    1 project | /r/gamedev | 1 Feb 2023
    You can also use the non-Steam parts of that library in any game in case you don't just release on Steam (have a look at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets )
  • Multiplayer game packaging
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 16 Jan 2023
    If you want to go the route of using a raw protocol and packing your messages yourself, I suggest to at least have a look at Valve's GameNetworkingSockets either for inspiration of what you might need or even to just use the library: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
  • does it cost money to have a small coop server?
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 26 Dec 2022
    There is early NAT piercing support in Valve's GameNetworkingSockets. Check out:
  • What network messaging library do you recommend?
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 6 Dec 2022
    You can also try Valve's GameNetworkingSockets with a serialization of your choice.
  • The Riftbreaker adds Steam Workshop Support, AMD FSR 2.1 support, Optimized CPU performance and more
    1 project | /r/pcgaming | 18 Nov 2022

Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

Posts with mentions or reviews of Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI). We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-14.
  • Developers are not happy with .NET MAUI, but nobody in the team cares about it
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 27 Nov 2023
  • Android predictive back support
    1 project | /r/dotnetMAUI | 25 Nov 2023
    I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680
  • Group List View And Collection View are not working In .NET MAVI For IOS
    1 project | /r/dotnetMAUI | 25 Nov 2023
    Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163
  • .NET 8 – MAUI
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    Maui is Open Source, MIT License

    https://github.com/dotnet/maui

    .NET is Open Source

    https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

    I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

    Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

    My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

    I hope I am not wrong.

  • .NET 8 – .NET Blog
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

    Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

    [0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

  • What's New in Final RC for .NET 8, .NET MAUI, Asp.net Core and EF8
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Oct 2023
    While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

    I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

    To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

    If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

    There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

  • MSFTbot: “We've moved this issue to the Backlog milestone”
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Sep 2023
  • Every other tab in Shell doesn't show Shell.TitleView on Android
    1 project | /r/dotnetMAUI | 31 Jul 2023
    First I came across this Github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/9687 - According to this issue, this is a known bug for MAUI iOS, but it works OK for MAUI Android. As I said, I target Android only and I have the exact same issue. It's apparantly fixed with some of the latest versions for MAUI but the problem still occurs to me even with MAUI version:
  • Bindable properties issue with Custom controls
    1 project | /r/dotnetMAUI | 12 Jun 2023
    I saw this and tried to imitate (ofc my lack of experience wouldn't allow me to do it in the exact way). Already found some documentation that allowed to understand better. Thanks for the insigh.
  • ASP.NET Core - how to create an IdentityUser account from an external login
    1 project | /r/csharp | 31 May 2023
    I implemented the Auth controller following this sample code from Microsoft.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GameNetworkingSockets and Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) you can also consider the following projects:

nakama - Distributed server for social and realtime games and apps.

Flutter - Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond

netcode.io - A protocol for secure client/server connections over UDP

Avalonia - Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology

libzt - Encrypted P2P sockets over ZeroTier

WPF - WPF is a .NET Core UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.

Game-Networking-Resources - A Curated List of Game Network Programming Resources [Moved to: https://github.com/ThusWroteNomad/GameNetworkingResources]

maui-linux - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Proton - Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components

Uno Platform - Build Mobile, Desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. Today. Open source and professionally supported.

GloSC - Tool for using the Steam-Controller as systemwide XInput controller alongside a global overlay [Moved to: https://github.com/Thracky/GlosSI]

react-native-windows - A framework for building native Windows apps with React.