Understanding the ENetMultiplayerPeer class

One of the Godot Engine Network API’s core features is the ENetMultiplayerPeer class. By using this class, we can perform a handshake between our game server and clients.

The ENetMultiplayerPeer class is a high-level implementation of the ENet library. Let’s understand this library and why we use it in online multiplayer games.

What is the ENet library?

ENet is a lightweight, open source networking library that is widely used in the game development industry. It is designed to be a high-performance, reliable, and easy-to-use library for creating multiplayer games and other networked applications. One advantage of the ENet library is that it’s cross-platform and written in C. So, it’s efficient with a small footprint and low overhead.

The library provides a simple and easy-to-use API that makes it easy for developers to create and manage network connections, send and receive packets, and handle network events such as disconnections and packet loss.

Packets, in this context, are small units of data that servers and clients transmit over the network. We use them to transmit information such as game state, player input, and other types of data between different devices on the network.

The ENet library offers support for multiple channels that allow us to easily create multiple streams of data, such as voice and video, within a single connection. This is excellent for many multiplayer games.

Another reason to use ENet in multiplayer games is its easy-to-use networking library that is based on the UDP protocol. This is a good chance to understand one of the main network protocols, so let’s do it.