GameNetworkingSockets VS netcode.io

Compare GameNetworkingSockets vs netcode.io and see what are their differences.

GameNetworkingSockets

Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption. (by ValveSoftware)
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GameNetworkingSockets netcode.io
35 6
8,195 2,432
0.6% 0.5%
8.3 9.2
about 1 month ago 30 days ago
C++ C
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" 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

netcode.io

Posts with mentions or reviews of netcode.io. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-06.
  • Multiplayer Networking Solutions
    19 projects | /r/gamedev | 6 Oct 2022
    yojimbo/ netcode/ reliable, all developped by Glenn Fidler, author of GafferOnGames
  • I just want force-feedback
    1 project | /r/starcitizen | 2 Oct 2022
    Man-in-the-middling the netcode. From what I can tell, this would work ... but the packets are encrypted. It appears the netcode is largely based on this library, that they sponsor. There appear to be some differences from the "standard" but there are too many similarities to not have a common ancestor. I got pretty far on this, just to at least verify there was encryption. Even if it is not encrypted, it appears to be a custom protocol.
  • What's an actually useful netcode package!
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 27 Sep 2022
    I use netcode.io - if you have read gafferongames posts, this is made by the guy.
  • Why is client FPS limited by netcode?
    1 project | /r/starcitizen | 10 Jan 2022
    You may not be there yet with your developer skills but if you are curious you can have a look at the netcode source code. I'm not sure if they're still using it since the switch to Lumberyard and Amazon Services but it's a really good and strong codebase: https://github.com/networkprotocol/netcode
  • Should I write my game server in C so that I can use the latest version of the netcode protocol?
    1 project | /r/gamedev | 18 Dec 2021
    I found that there is a relatively new protocol called netcode.io that provides UDP-like connection between client-server.
  • P2P vs Client Server
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 4 Sep 2021
    If you want to learn more about networking for game in C++, Glenn Fiedler has great articles from the basics to advanced topics: https://www.gafferongames.com/ He also created a library for client-server networking: https://github.com/networkprotocol/netcode (He has a big name in networking, totally recommend reading his articles if you want to learn more about networking)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GameNetworkingSockets and netcode.io you can also consider the following projects:

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

KCP - :zap: KCP - A Fast and Reliable ARQ Protocol

libzt - Encrypted P2P sockets over ZeroTier

yojimbo - A network library for client/server games written in C++

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

libquic - QUIC, a multiplexed stream transport over UDP

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

RakNet - RakNet is a cross platform, open source, C++ networking engine for game programmers.

GlosSI - Note that I am not currently contributing to GlosSI. This fork is only here just in case I do decide to contribute again.

wdt - Warp speed Data Transfer (WDT) is an embeddedable library (and command line tool) aiming to transfer data between 2 systems as fast as possible over multiple TCP paths.

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

libcurl - A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features

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