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Scaleform partnership for a lobby integration

Whenever a customer has difficulty with RakNet, or a feature of RakNet, I reflect on what I could have done better to help them. So when Stardock, used RakNet as part of their lobby system, I noted that it took them an alarming amount of time and resources relative to my expectations. Part of this […]

Whenever a customer has difficulty with RakNet, or a feature of RakNet, I reflect on what I could have done better to help them. So when Stardock, used RakNet as part of their lobby system, I noted that it took them an alarming amount of time and resources relative to my expectations. Part of this was that RakNet’s NAT punchthrough feature was not as sophisticated as it is now. And part of it is just the magnitude of this feature, involving:

  • Remote server hosting
  • Proxy server hosting
  • UPNP
  • Handling difficult to handle failure conditions

The only way to help the customer get around this is to do it for them, which involves lobby and UI code.

Scaleform by far has the best cross-platform solution for UI. So I negotiated a partnership with them, allowing Jenkins Software LLC to use and release Scaleform integration code to our customers. This was done for the Autopatcher. And I’m now having our own Lobby system made. This is a huge feature, but when done can encompass things such as user registration, game rankings, clans, friends, emails, rooms, and NAT punchthrough. All the end user would need to do is license Scaleform and skin the UI that RakNet provides. From a competitive standpoint, this puts us on par with other major middleware providers and eliminates the last reason any developer may have to use their services rather than RakNet.

It’s a pretty big deal, and when done, I believe will be a huge boost to sales and a serious threat to the competition.

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