Valve To Open-Source Their Steam Networking Sockets Library

Valve is preparing to make another significant open-source code contribution in the very near future.

Valve developers are working on open-sourcing their Steam Networking Sockets library. This library is a basic network transport layer for games with a TCP-inspired protocol that is message-oriented, built-in re-transmission for greater reliability, bandwidth estimation, supports encryption, and will handle other features needed for a practical networking layer by modern games.

The SteamNetworkingSockets library is currently used by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and other games on Steam. This networking sockets library will be able to function independently of Steam and is being released under a three-clause BSD license.

It will be interesting to see how well this game networking sockets library works once the code is made available compared to the many other existing game networking libraries already available and several open-source projects, but should prove to be useful with it being good enough for CS:GO and other Steam multi-platform games.

Update: The initialized Git repository is at GameNetworkingSockets albeit the code drop has yet to happen.