Author: rakkar

Last week when I was looking for web design companies to make a new website for RakNet, I sent out about 10 requests for bids. The request was well-written, complete, and professional. However, I only got 5 responses. At roughly the same time, I contacted 3 marketing firms to help market RakNet, and didn’t get any responses.

Imagine if, instead of Jenkins Software, Microsoft or Sony sent that same sales request? How many replies would they have gotten?

This is clout, and its based on how much money the other side thinks you have, and how much they think they can gain from dealing with you. It’s like a game almost, where you have to have a certain clout level to talk to certain NPCs.

Connections are the cheat codes to give yourself clout with certain NPCs.

Yesterday I said to a friend, “Friends and connections are what this industry is about I think.” In fact some business activities require so much clout that it is nearly impossible to achieve them without connections, or the clout that connections have already provided you:

1. Become a licensed console developer
2. Sell to a company that makes over a few million in sales a year
3. Purchase major advertising
4. Get mentioned in major game industry news reports
5. Hire top-tier talent
6. Partner with other companies to form bundling deals
7. Get outside funding

And if I wrote a list of the 7 activities that make a middleware company most likely to succeed, what would that be?

Succeeding with connections is not a matter of making false friends of hope of getting something in return. It’s about being able to work with people you trust, and having those people trust you in return. Big deals require trust and 90% of our daily interactions is based the human factor.

Don’t burn your bridges, make an effort to know people, give good customer support, help people who ask for help sincerely, and keep in contact with the people you do know.

When I originally released RakNet I charged $2,000 per application. Later, I charged $0 (free) to increase market share because nobody was buying it at $2,000. Later, as it improved I charged $4,000. I got some sales there, so raised my price to $5,000. All the while I was wondering at the greed of my competitors that charged hundreds of thousands for more restrictive licensing terms. I was competing on price because I could afford to do so, and while my prices were good for an individual at the time, they weren’t enough to hire web designers, support, testers, etc. so I was endlessly stuck as a one man operation. I even read back then on Joel on Software about startups “Don’t compete on price” but didn’t listen.

What I didn’t understand at the time is while there was a HUGE difference between $2000 and $10,000 to me as an individual, to a developer that is the SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY – if your software helps them, they will license it either way, and it’s just as hard to sell to them. This is even more true with a publisher. You could charge basically what it would cost to write, and they would still license your software as long as it saves them time.

The hard part is:

1. Get them to know about your product in the first place
2. Convince them your product is worth using
3. Get through the non-programmers and legal to actually get money into your bank account

Because I undercharged originally, I short-changed my company money licensees would have been willing to pay. And since I was charging one-man prices, I never grew beyond a one man operation.

You might ask, “So what, as long as the quality is the same?” I did, and for programmers it doesn’t matter, because they are looking at your code, not your website. This will get some sales at smaller companies. At larger companies, programmers usually aren’t the ones writing the checks. Before signing any big deal, HR, lawyers, and producers are going to look at your site. And as I found out the hard way, all it takes is for a lawyer to say “This guy’s site sucks, so we don’t even want to deal with him” to stop a deal.

Also, by not financially growing your company, your competitors that do get the funds / clout to do direct marketing, and bundling, and get their software on the front page of gaming sites. I on the other hand have to sell to smaller customer base, many of whom already have my competitor’s product through a bundle. It’s like how I bought Windows Vista with my laptop, something I would have never done if I had the choice. Right now I have so little clout that even some advertisers won’t return my calls.

Because the quality is so good, RakNet actually has #2 marketshare right now, and I’m proud of that. But I only recently started charging realistic prices, and have to play catch-up.

Bit of advice based on what I’m going through now:

If you ever write middleware, make sure your contract includes that you can list the customer on the customer page of your website. It’s easy to get when selling your middleware, but quite hard to get retroactively. Right now a huge game is coming out using RakNet, and I’m not sure if I can list them as a customer which is very frustrating.

I hear that all other middleware companies also force the developers to list the middleware library logos on their splash screen. That’s another thing I previously had optional, and in practice has only happened once that I’m aware of. I’ve probably cheated myself out of a lot of free marketing and sales because of that. Make it another requirement.

I have another deal in the works and just delayed it to ask for this, but it’s important enough I’d rather lose the deal than get a deal without it.

It uses the layered service provider system I wrote about. For any UDP based application (actually with one line of code change it work with TCP too) it will add the desired attributes to the connection.

One big snag is how to implement an incoming bandwidth throttle. There are 3 ways data can come in, nonblocking, blocking, or with IO completion ports. Nonblocking is the easiest, I just stick the data into a buffer and return it when the user later calls recv or recvfrom again. Blocking is harder. I would have to put an infinite loop in the recvfrom call and not return until the required latency has elapsed. However, you can break out of the Windows version of recvfrom with a signaled event, and I have no idea how I’d hook into that event. IO completion ports is similar to nonblocking, but the buffer has to be added to from a worker thread elsewhere. If I can’t figure this out I’d have to drop the incoming bandwidth throttle. This would have been easier if I had implemented it at the NDIS level, although it would have been harder in other ways.

Another problem is the layered transport service provided by windows is DLL and registry based. So if you were to kill the program with end process, the DLL would not be uninstalled automatically when the process shuts down. If you were to then delete the program without uninstalling it that DLL would be stuck in your system, loading up the QoS emulator when you don’t want it. I’m not sure if the DLL can unregister itself in its own startup call. If I can, I will check for the program installation in startup, and have the DLL unregister itself if it looks like the program was uninstalled.

I’m not sure all this will work on Vista either. There was some crap in the Windows SDK documentation about security and various extra things you have to do in the installer, the registry, and the program itself. I only scanned over it in passing while looking for info on the Winsock debug/trace DLL system. I hope there’s code there I can just copy/paste.

This program has been very complicated and difficult to write, partly because I’ve never done anything like it before. It requires knowledge of threads, IO completion ports, sockets and socket properties, the registry, installation settings and permissions, interprocess communication, hooking in and debugging DLLs called by the system, and complicated associations between LSPs, the high level user-code, other LSPs, and the low level transport service provider. That article by Microsoft states “You will probably find that implementing an LSP is no longer a daunting and time-consuming task if you simply extend the layered sample” but if they consider that to be easy I’d hate to see what they consider hard.

Thanks to Jason King for help designing the GUI!

I was reading http://dewitters.koonsolo.com/gameloop.html where the author, Koen Witters, proposes a fixed-update game loop with a variable update render loop using interpolation to find out between-frame render positions. It’s a well written article and his solution is good for single player games.


const int TICKS_PER_SECOND = 25;
const int SKIP_TICKS = 1000 / TICKS_PER_SECOND;
const int MAX_FRAMESKIP = 5;

loops = 0;
while( GetTickCount() > next_game_tick && loops < MAX_FRAMESKIP) { update_game(); next_game_tick += SKIP_TICKS; loops++; } interpolation = float( GetTickCount() + SKIP_TICKS - next_game_tick ) / float( SKIP_TICKS ); display_game( interpolation ); }

However, this has problems with online games. In networking, you often need to extrapolate given a prior position and some amount of time to the current time. For example, I may get a position packet 208 milliseconds ago. If I were to update every 40 milliseconds (25 ticks per second), I would have 8 milliseconds leftover. This moves the problem of left-over ticks to your game objects.

You can either calculate partial ticks, in which case your game objects are slightly out of synch with the fixed-step simulation, or you can ignore them, and just use the least number of ticks you can fit in. If you get frequent updates this is OK, but for objects that are not updated frequently things can get out of place, and a lot faster than 2.4336088699783431e-13.

My solution is variable length game updates with variable length frame updates, with a frequency limit on game updates.

Variable length updates with variable length frame updates:


// Do not skip more than one second (due to debugging)
const int MIN_UPDATE_TIME=1000;
// Do not update more than every 10 milliseconds
const int MAX_UPDATE_TIME=10;
// How much time to render forward
float renderExtrapolationTime;

renderInterpolationTime = GetTimeMS() - lastGameUpdate;
display_game( renderExtrapolationTime );
elapsedGameTime=GetTimeMS()-lastGameUpdate;
}