ENet Plugin

A REAL studio plugin that adds ENet sockets to REAL Studio.
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ENet Plugin Ranking & Summary

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  • Rating:
  • License:
  • Demo
  • Publisher Name:
  • Einhugur Software
  • Publisher web site:
  • http://www.einhugur.com/
  • Operating Systems:
  • Mac OS X 10.0 or later
  • File Size:
  • 316 KB

ENet Plugin Tags


ENet Plugin Description

A REAL studio plugin that adds ENet sockets to REAL Studio. ENet's purpose is to provide a relatively thin, simple and robust network communication layer on top of UDP (User Datagram Protocol). The primary feature offered by the ENet Plugin is the in-order, optional reliable delivery of packets.ENet omits certain higher level networking features such as authentication, lobbying, server discovery, encryption, or other similar tasks that are particularly application specific so that the library remains flexible, portable, and easily embeddable.ENet evolved specifically as a UDP networking layer for the multiplayer first person shooter Cube.Cube necessitated low latency communication with data sent out very frequently, so TCP was an unsuitable choice due to its high latency and stream orientation. UDP, however, lacks many sometimes necessary features from TCP such as reliability, sequencing, unrestricted packet sizes, and connection management. So UDP by itself was not suitable as a network protocol either. No suitable freely available networking libraries existed at the time of ENet's creation to fill this niche.UDP and TCP could have been used together in Cube to benefit somewhat from both of their features, however, the resulting combinations of protocols still leaves much to be desired. TCP lacks multiple streams of communication without resorting to opening many sockets and complicates delineation of packets due to its buffering behavior. UDP lacks sequencing, connection management, management of bandwidth resources, and imposes limitations on the size of packets. A significant investment is required to integrate these two protocols, and the end result is worse off in features and performance than the uniform protocol presented by ENet.ENet thus attempts to address these issues and provide a single, uniform protocol layered over UDP to the developer with the best features of UDP and TCP as well as some useful features neither provide, with a much cleaner integration than any resulting from a mixture of UDP and TCP.Rather than a single byte stream that complicates the delineation of packets, ENet presents connections as multiple, properly sequenced packet streams that simplify the transfer of various types of data.ENet provides sequencing for all packets by assigning to each sent packet a sequence number that is incremented as packets are sent. ENet guarantees that no packet with a higher sequence number will be delivered before a packet with a lower sequence number, thus ensuring packets are delivered exactly in the order they are sent.For unreliable packets, ENet will simply discard the lower sequence number packet if a packet with a higher sequence number has already been delivered. This allows the packets to be dispatched immediately as they arrive, and reduce latency of unreliable packets to an absolute minimum. For reliable packets, if a higher sequence number packet arrives, but the preceding packets in the sequence have not yet arrived, ENet will stall delivery of the higher sequence number packets until its predecessors have arrived. Requirements: · REAL Studio 2009r1 or later. Limitations: · Limited usage. What's New in This Release: · Linked against the new ENet 1.3.3 instead of 1.3.2.


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