ReplicaNet

I''m in agreement with you. If they can sell at this price then I need to get package up some of my stuff and try to sell it too hmmm, maybe that''s how our team could get funding.



Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

For a product that has no support and that is an API carbon copy of Quazal Net-Z, I''d stay clear if I was you...

For that price I didn''t even want to download the free trial just to check it out

I''m one of those guys who likes to write his own libraries anyhow. I was just really surprised when I came across the pricing for this network library. Ugh.



Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

Yeesh. Cheapskates. "all software should be free..." - whatever. Considering you get unlimited licenses, I think it''s a good deal (if it works well - the documentation doesn''t look so hot to me).

But think of it this way - how much would it cost you to replicate replicanet? Sure, if you''re doing your project as a hobby - nothing. And you can learn a lot by doing it yourself. But if you''re a pro shop with a schedule and a budget, it could easily cost 2-3 times that much.

Reliable udp, encryption & verification (which I didn''t see a mention of, so they should add it), cross-platform api, server sessions, object replication - none of these things are difficult. But writing them, debugging, documenting, figuring out all the details - could easily eat up a few months of full-time work.

More important than their (I think low) cost is whether the product is good - how good do you think their api is? Can it be used without threads in a game loop? How good is the documentation (just from spelling & grammer errors = not too hot)? Does it perform well? How good is their support? If these issues are addressed satisfactorily, then I think their price is reasonable.

er, didn''t mean to rant...

For the record if you go to:
http://www.replicanet.com/pricing.html
and
http://www.replicanet.com/support.html

You will see that technical support is provided for all the current licenses. Technical support time for bugs and fixes in the API are also free of charge.

Lastly ReplicaNet can be purchased with source code. Try getting to see source code from other similar libaries.

Also you should check the prices offered by similar products because I think you will find that ReplicaNet with or without source is good value in comparison. The nearest comparable library is about 30,000 dollars without source. If I remember correctly. Someone check that and get back on that?

If you consider that one engineer earns about 3000 dollars a month and a really good one earns much more then you are able to purchase a nicely written bug fixed library with source for less than 3 engineer months. Which is cheap if you have a project that needs a good network solution straight away.



[edited by - fnagaton on August 11, 2002 11:46:30 AM]

[edited by - fnagaton on August 11, 2002 11:54:51 AM]

quote:

---

Original post by PlasticMan
Yeesh. Cheapskates. "all software should be free..." - whatever.

---

No one said that all software should be free. I was just surprised by the price.



Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

The price for Net Z is about $30,000 so replicanet looks like a cheap alternative imho.

I tried to find Net Z but couldn''t (other than www.net-z.com) happen to have a link?

Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

http://www.proksim.com/products/netz.html

I downloaded the replica net example and it worked OK. The libs and source examples are quite well commented and easy to follow.
Using these it was easy to use it in a simple game I wrote a while ago and make it multiplayer.