Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Valve has released an update for its GameNetworkingSockets library after nearly four years. The new version, v1.5, includes several API additions and improvements, including initial Rust bindings. This library is crucial for various games, including Counter-Strike and Dota 2, and supports features like peer-to-peer networking and encryption.
- ▪GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 was released after a hiatus since June 2022.
- ▪The update includes improvements such as peer-to-peer enhancements and better CMake integration.
- ▪Rust bindings for the library were contributed by the open-source community.
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Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 28 April 2026 at 08:22 PM EDT. 11 Comments Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today. GameNetworkingSockets serves reliable and unreliable message types and provides a connection-oriented API for games/engines that is message-oriented like UDP. GameNetworkingSockets supports IPv6, peer-to-peer networking, encryption, and much more.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Phoronix.