GarageGame releases Network Code for Indies
by Kit

Wednesday, April 21 2004

Torque Network Library will provide net integration for indie games.

GarageGames announced today that it has released its award-winning network code as the stand-alone, cross-platform Torque Network Library (TNL) under their trademark 'indie' license, a full commercial license and a GPL Open Source license.

The Torque Network Library is a robust, secure, easy to use cross-platform C++ networking API intended for integration into high performance simulations and games.

"TNL allows developers to support more players while using less bandwidth per client than any other solution on the market. Even under adverse net conditions TNL delivers a lag free experience," explains Mark Frohnmayer, GarageGames Founder and Director of Internal Development. "In less than a day you can have a minimal TNL implementation up and running in your game or network product, within weeks you can take advantage of all the advanced features of the TNL."

Designed to be easily integrated into existing products, its features include:

Robust connection architecture

Multiple levels of data guarantee

Bit-level compression for optimal bandwidth utilization

Server Object replication (ghosting) and management

Simple and efficient event and RPC (remote procedure call) framework

Extensible master server framework

Documentation, tutorials and example code, and full library source code

“We’re known for providing top quality game development tools to independent developers,” comments Jay Moore, GarageGames Evangelist, “but we still play the mainstream multiplayer games from the major studios and now there is just no excuse for any game to have poorly performing network code.”

Torque Network Library ships with several example applications, including Zap, a retro space shooter featuring robust networked physics, a simple client/server example application, and a master server for matchmaking and game tracking. TNL makes use of the publicly available libtomcrypt library for cryptographic operations, and GLUT for cross-platform OpenGL setup and rendering in the graphical example applications.

With an ongoing commitment to lowering the barrier to top quality technology GarageGames is releasing the Torque Network Library with three licensing options. The commercial license, for closed-source commercial products, is available for $995 per programmer seat. The Independent Game developer license, for closed source, independently produced game titles, is available for $295 per seat. Finally, for Open Source projects, GarageGames is making the Torque Network Library available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Details about the open source TNL project can be found at http://www.opentnl.org. Full licensing information is available at http://www.garagegames.com/tnl.

--- Kit