Oculus VR acquires and open sources Raknet

Oculus VR has acquired C++ game networking engine RakNet and has released the open source files to all Oculus Rift developers.

Ozzie Mejia

July 7, 2014 11:05 AM

The folks at Oculus continue their efforts to create an optimal gaming experience. So to that end, the company has announced the acquisition of C++ game networking engine RakNet. For those that own an Oculus Rift VR dev kit, they'll now be able to utilize the RakNet open source.

"We've known Kevin Jenkins, founder of Jenkins Software and lead engineer on RakNet, for years, and we've used RakNet internally at Oculus for various networked systems and tools," states the announcement post. "After working with Kevin for a few months, we were all excited by the idea of open-sourcing RakNet to the community."

The Jenkins Software-created RakNet has been utilized by a large number of game developers across all major gaming platforms, including Mojang and Sony Online Entertainment. It's used for such features as secure connections, real-time SQL logs, and object replication. The RakNet open source files have previously been made available to all games grossing under $100,000, to assist low-income indie developers. Those looking to use RakNet tech for their Oculus Rift projects can now find the open source code here, under the same modified BSD license currently by Facebook for their open source projects.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

Filed Under

From The Chatty

Refresh Go To Thread

Shacknews

 reply
July 7, 2014 11:05 AM

Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, Oculus VR acquires and open sources Raknet.

Oculus VR has acquired C++ game networking engine RakNet and has released the open source files to all Oculus Rift developers.
- thecatinthehat
  
   reply
  July 7, 2014 12:53 PM
  
  What if you just paid for a license?
  - Turd Ferguson
    
     reply
    July 7, 2014 1:02 PM
    
    Pwned by Facebook wooooo
- the archvile
  
   reply
  July 7, 2014 2:57 PM
  
  Bonus news: the conference "Oculus Connect" is going to take place in Hollywood on September 19-20.
  
  http://recode.net/2014/07/07/oculus-plans-developer-conference-in-september/
  http://www.oculusvr.com/connect/
  
  Oculus Connect is planned for Sept. 19-20 in Los Angeles and will feature keynote talks from CEO Brendan Iribe, founder Palmer Luckey, CTO John Carmack and chief scientist Michael Abrash.
  
  In other words, we essentially get two QuakeCons this year (...but which one is the REAL QuakeCon?????).
  - Grape Flavor
    
     reply
    July 7, 2014 4:52 PM
    
    I'm dying for Oculus to announce the controller. They've repeatedly hinted that they've got several somethings in the works and one of them just has to be an input device.
    
    The headset, yeah it's great. But it's a known quantity at this point. We can all extrapolate what the consumer Rift will be like already from the prototypes.
    
    The input is the great unsolved riddle in my opinion. VR deserves something fancier than an Xbox controller and I can't wait to see what that ends up being.
- Professer12
  
   reply
  July 7, 2014 4:44 PM
  
  Exciting. I've used RakNet before; definitely one of the biggest and best options for networking middleware. Great to see it fully open sourced.