You can now pass in your own method to perform http requests for server datacenter autodetection

Previous releases relied on curl being available on the command line to perform cloud datacenter auto detection, for example, which google cloud or AWS datacenter your server is running in.

Now you can override the curl-based http requests with your own function that perform the http/https requests used for autodetection. See next_autodetect_http_request_function in the source for details.

Building on top of this functionality, the Unreal Engine plugin now performs auto detection using Unreal's HTTP module, removing the dependency on curl.

Unreal Engine plugin is production ready

This release contains a production ready UE5 plugin, fixes for the XDP relay so it works across Google Cloud, AWS, Akamai and bare metal, as well as some small fixes to the portal.

XDP relay is now production ready

The relay now uses uses kernel bypass technology to process and forward packets more efficiently than the previous relay implementation. This lets you accelerate many more sessions through a relay than you previously could.

Update to source available license

The new license is based on the Redis Source Available License v2.

In short, you can use Network Next with your game FOR FREE, but you cannot use the source code to create a commercial product that is licensed to 3rd parties, for example a hosted version of Network Next as SaaS.

More Documentation and Fixes

Added a detailed, worked example of how to customize your installation of Network Next to get acceleration to a test server running in São Paulo, Brasil, plus many small workflow improvements, bug fixes and enhancements to support this worked example.

Akamai Relay Fix

Previous code tested to see if the Linux kernel was up to date on relays by checking if uname -r output contained the string "6.5".

Now there are kernel versions in production above 6.5 on Akamai, so the "next setup" relay command would get stuck trying to update the Linux kernel, and then checking for "6.5" in uname -r and never finding it because the updated kernel version was 6.8 for example.

The fix is to extract the kernel version major and minor numbers from uname -r output and then properly test if the major, minor version numbers are older than 6.5, and only then upgrade the Linux kernel.

Small Fixes

This release contains small fixes discovered while working with a customer.

• Fix an instance of '~secrets/' to '~/secrets/' in setup documentation
• Fix company name not getting updated in scripts/setup_relay.sh on "next config"
• Fix cloudflare_zone_id not getting copied across from config to terraform scripts on "next config"
• Make apt run in non-interactive mode in terraform scripts via DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
• Update maxmind.com ip2location download to the new method required by maxmind: https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/updating-databases#directly-downloading-databases
• Strip any leading or trailing newlines in ~/secrets/terraform-akamai.txt and ~/secrets/terraform-cloudflare.txt before using them in terraform
• Don't use default google networks in terraform dev relay and prod relay projects. Some enterprise google cloud orgs don't allow creation of default networks in projects, and this breaks setup until the default network is manually created: https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Infrastructure-Compute-Storage/Is-there-a-default-netwok-in-a-new-provisioned-project/m-p/428917

Production Ready

Network Next is now production ready.

v1.0.0-xdp-preview

This release add support for a preview XDP-based relay. This relay runs in kernel space on Linux and provides much greater throughput.

Much of the crypto and packet headers needed adjustment to work well with the XDP program validator, in addition I passed over all platforms and made sure that they respect a max MTU of 1384 packets, set do not fragment bit in outgoing UDP packets, and made DSCP packet tagging production ready across all platforms.

The next release will have the full XDP relay and will be the production ready 1.0.0 release.

Consoles

This release updates console platform support to the latest platform SDK versions as of the start of 2024.

• Passed across all console platforms and verified correct operation on hardware with latest development tools.
• Created test client projects per-platform under sdk/build that you can use to build and run unit tests and connect a client to the linux test server in dev.
• Windows, Linux, Mac and GDK updated to use dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 sockets. This is required for iOS App Store approval, and for Xbox game approval.
• PS4, PS5 still use IPv4 sockets, because IPv6 support is optional on Playstation.
• Nintendo Switch still uses IPv4 sockets because the platform does not support IPv6.
• Updated GDK platform to use the preferred game port to enable WMM and DSCP packet tagging on Xbox platforms. This provides reduced packet loss and jitter on Wi-Fi when enabled. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/networking/overviews/game-mesh/preferred-local-udp-multiplayer-port-networking and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/networking/overviews/qos-packet-tagging
• Created separate functions so customers can set priority and affinity for client and server packet receive threads independently on each platform. This is useful in particular for customers with Windows servers, so they can tune the priority for server packet receive thread separetly to the client packet receive thread.