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Raknet vs OpenTNL

Started by cyanbeck Feb 18, 2009 at 11:37 PM 0 replies 4.7k views
Original Post
cyanbeck
cyanbeck
Becasue in this thread http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=520594 there is no feature comparison between Raknet and OpenTNL. Another thread's disscusion of RPC between Raknet and OpenTNL is four years ago. http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=224058 There were some defects of Raknet. Has it improved at present? I noticed that the latest release 1.5.0 of OpenTNL is also four years ago. Is it because OpenTNL already completely perfect so that there is no need of any maintenance or is it just out of date? And how about their licenses, respectivly? I found that OpenTNL has a commercial license on its website. But the link is broken... Any comment or review about both libraries would be very appreciated.
Brad789
Brad789
I've used both these libraries, purchased an indie programmer license for TNL and will eventually buy one for RakNet. I started out on TNL a few years ago using it as the networking library for the turn based strategy game I'm working on. I later switched to RakNet and my transition has recently finished. I'll list the pros and cons from my point of view.

TNL:
pros
- Can easily add user data structure to a connection
- Takes longer to learn basics but for some situations less coding required
- Can be used for free under the GPL license

cons
- It ended up having a max message/packet size of around 1500 bytes, actually my program had issues if I went over 1000 or so, that might have been my fault. This is pretty small if you're sending large chunks game data, but I suppose a good size if you're sending 100 3d position updates per second. I ended up having my streaming code break up and reassemble each message on the other side. Having this many packets made the total message transfer time longer than if I could have sent data in 32k chunks.
- To compile on newer linux compilers I had to add -fPermissive to the compile flag to makefiles.
- No 64 bit support.
- Uses a lot more macros than RakNet, macro heavy code tends to be harder to debug
- Development stopped a while ago, the fact that the link to purchase a license doesn't work suggests they are going to let it die

RakNet:
pros
- Constantly developed
- Active support forum
- Can compile on 64 bit machines
- In my experience fairly stable and straightforward, easier to learn
- Can be used for free if your work is not commercial, otherwise a commercial license is available
- Can send large messages, it handles fragmentation and assembly

cons
- Seems a little lower level than TNL
- Web page says newer RPC code only tested on Win32
- Must associate connection with user data in my own code

I'm probably a little biased having chosen RakNet after becoming a little frustrated with TNL, and I'm writing a strategy game not a 3D shooter so I haven't found much of a reason to try out some of the more advanced features like Ghosting(TNL) and Replica manager(RakNet). I prefer RakNet, and would suggest using it or some other continually developed networking library(not many other choices though) instead of TNL.

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