The folks at Humble Bundle and Mozilla have this week released HumbleNet, a free-to-use cross-platform networking library designed to help peer-to-peer multiplayer games work across different browsers and OSes.
This seems potentially useful for devs working on multiplayer games, or who have an interest in porting multiplayer games to browsers and rigging them up for cross-platform peer-to-peer networking.
According to a more in-depth blog post on the tech, HumbleNet is basically “a simple C API that wraps WebRTC and WebSockets and hides away all the platform differences between browser and non-browser platforms.”
“The current version of the library exposes a simple peer-to-peer API that allows for basic peer discovery and the ability to easily send data (via WebRTC) to other peers,” it continues. “In this manner, you can build a game that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, while using any web browser — and they can all communicate in real-time via WebRTC.”
The post traces HumbleNet’s origins back to a 2015 initiative at Humble Bundle to get peer-to-peer multiplayer games running via asm.js and, later, WebAssembly. Now version 1.0 HumbleNet has been made freely available on Github for game devs to contribute to and use under a modified BSD license.