RakNet VS FlatBuffers

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.

Raknet No longer worked on but from what I've read, it's complete and working. It has been used in many games between 2000 - 2010

Inconsistencies can be prevented by ensuring the server handles all operations and does so in a given order, then transmits the results to clients. I wrote a little about this for my game Avoyd a long while ago. Clients (including a client running the server) send an edit request via reliable ordered UDP (e.g. using Enet, Raknet, Steam Networking etc.) and the server places these in a single queue then performs the edits and sends the results back also using reliable ordered UDP.

RakNet. It's been forked but still not that active.

RakNet (UDP network library)

I don't work at Cloudflare but follow their work and occasionally work on performance sensitive projects.

If I had to guess, they looked at the landscape a bit like I do and regarded Cap'n Proto, flatbuffers, SBE, etc. as being in one category apart from other data formats like Avro, protobuf, and the like.

So once you're committed to record'ish shaped (rather than columnar like Parquet) data that has an upfront parse time of zero (nominally, there could be marshalling if you transmogrify the field values on read), the list gets pretty short.

https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers-... goes into some of the trade-offs here.

Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/. That work (which Kenton has presumably done at Cloudflare since he's been employed there) eventually turned into Cloudflare workers.

Another consideration: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/2#issuecomment-...

Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.

Or, as an alternative to protobuffers, there's also flatbuffers, which is lighter weight and needs less memory: https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/

A few years ago, their was a talk about flatbuffers[0] being a memory efficient and quicker method than JSON.

Anyone have any real world experience with it?

[0] https://github.com/google/flatbuffers

Click HERE and HERE. Download both files, and extract the .ZIPs anywhere.

The information can be stored in a database or as files, serialized in a standard format and with a schema agreed with your Data Engineering team. Depending on your information and requirements, it can be as simple as CSV, XML or JSON, or Big Data formats such as Parquet, Avro, ORC, Arrow, or message serialization formats like Protocol Buffers, FlatBuffers, MessagePack, Thrift, or Cap'n Proto.

FlatBuffer also developed by Google. It's used by Cocos2d-x, a game engine , as serialization protocol, instead of JSON / XML / YAML.

Flatbuffers