K-NetLib licensing now available!

Hi all,

Just wanted to let everyone know that K-NetLib is now available for commercial licensing. K-NetLib is a DLL that can be used with any language (that supports DLL's, obviously) to allow the developer to incorporate powerful networking into their games and applications quickly, with lots of flexibility, and it's royalty free!

If you're just using the library for freeware apps, you don't need to license it. But if you want to have the flexibility to sell anything you make with K-NetLib, it's only US$29.95. One license and you can make as many commercial applications as you want!

For all the details, please visit the K-NetLib Information Area: http://www.krylarskreations.com/knl.shtml

Thank you for your support!

-Krylar

well whatayaknow... I just saw this over at the playbasic site. Right now you are their only choice for networking. Might pick up some sales there. :)

But... What does it do for me in blitz that say BlitzPlay Pro wouldn't do for me? Or blitz's basic networking stuff? (Other than BlitzMax's that is which sucks the big one right now).

Kanati

Nice one, Krylar. Must feel great to have it ready for licensing. What's next? Another book?

Long time no hear Krylar, glad to see you are doing great, best wishes to you.

This looks very interesting, about to take a closer look....

Hey all :D

Kanati:

I'll have to take a peek over at playbasic then. Thanks for the tip!

Basically it does a whole ton of stuff. If you take a look at the online help docs:

http://www.krylarskreations.com/KNL_help/

...you can see all the commands and layout and such.

Sybixsus:
Another book is already in the works, yep. ;) I'm thinking it'll be the last one for a while...too demanding that!

Pl@nt@genet:
Wish I had more time to spend hanging out. I'm trying to lay plans for the next few months to be more active again. Hopefully it all works out. Good to see familiar faces...erm...aliases. :D

All the best!

-Krylar

Cool! Looks good.

looks good!

No UDP though?

I've been looking forward to this. I am suprised there is no UDP support and the fact that it uses directplay means that it's going to be no good for any of our Blitzmax crossplatform net games. Still a nice product though.

Hiya :D

...from KNL's developer (PJoe):

K-NetLib DLL is based on DirectPlay technology, but it is not a single wrapper. Instead, K-NetLib is more like a controling scheme that allow you to gain access over DirectPlay from any language capable of linking to a dynamic library.

Since DirectPlay is UDP, K-NetLib is also UDP. This, though, doesn't cause any problems if you need guaranteed delivery of messages in your applications. Indeed, you can mix a set of options in order to instruct the library how you want your outgoing/incoming messages to be handled. These are some of the features you can mix:

* Signed / Unsigned messages;
* CRC check / no CRC check (hashed over the message content);
* Reliable / Unreliable delivery system;
* Timeout / Infinite Tries delivery;
* Sequential / Non-Sequential delivery;
* Sync / Async transmission.

Hope that helps clear up the UDP stuff ;) I can tell you that this system is wickedly fast. Grab the download and check out the demos for details.

EDIT: You are correct in that it's currently only going to be good for Windows-based games. We are looking into re-opening things in the future for further platform support. Probably not until mid-next year though...it really depends on the demand needed. And, of course, if we go that route all registered users get the licensing for that at no additional charge.

-Krylar

Hey Krylar! Still hangin out in the Northern VA area?

Moved into Maryland now. About 15 mins from Germantown. Hope things are going good for you, man! :D

Still alive, been working at a government contracting company in Tysons Corner doing web development stuff and finally decided after moving through tons of dev engines, that BlitzMax was the one that worked best for me.....hence I'm back here again.

Hi, sorry I'm not impressed.

I would consider it if you included some kind of anti lag measure though. I believe thats really quite essential... otherwise we might as well use directplay from blitz.

Good effort though.

Thanks for the feedback. It was because of the lack of ability through Blitz's DirectPlay interface that we (Surreal and I) started up BlitzPlay. This was done for the "Learn to Program 2D Games in Blitz Basic" book.

Then I thought it would be cool to have a DLL that would cover any language that can use DLL's. Thus, K-NetLib was born. It's got far more capability than the standard Blitz commandset for multiplayer. Honestly don't know about how it stacks up to BlitzMax though.

Anit-Lag measure was something we thought of but we haven't yet implemented. The primary reason we haven't gone that route yet is that it seems to be primarily a prediction method (at least this is what we've learned of it...if anyone knows of other potentials for anti-lag, please advise! ;)). So it could be different based upon what your game needs are. Typically these types of thing can be handled by the developer more effectively than an engine providing a catch-all system. However, we haven't ruled out the possibility of adding the feature. Rather, we're just trying to think of how we'd go about it so it'd work well for most cases.

Again, thanks for the feedback. We appreciate all comments on the system!

-Krylar

BMax doesn't have JACK for networking at this point. So KNet Library is light years ahead of the curve.

(Which I think is insane of Mark to have left out multiplayer capabilities... truly sad.)

of course if I were running a version later than 1.04 I'd know he did finally add some socket commands...

omg K. Umm, yes, wasn't there also a module called BNet that somebody made? And maybe even one other... TNet or something... I have no idea how they compare though...

Welcome to MD ;c)

I've tested both Vertex's BNet and Wave's TNet extensively. I wouldn't recommend TNet in its current state, there are a few critical bugs that need to be worked out first. BNet gives you all the basic tcp/udp commands the old Blitzes had. I'm currently using the UDP in a realtime action game and it's working beautifully with 8 players or more. My point is that there are indeed perfectly good net libs available for Max.

* back on topic *
Krylar, nice work on your library. I can tell you are the kind of person who gets things done once he sets his mind to it. Best of luck with your future projects.

Looks nice, tho I'm using RakNet for a while...

What about a comparsion chart between libraries?

Are they the same? How possible would it seem to be able to mix BNet and possibly a modified hack of BlitzPlay together? =]

Yay, grats Krylar! (btw hello! ;))