[ENet-discuss] 1.2.2 and 1.3.0 PRE-release

Thu May 20 15:40:42 PDT 2010

On packet sizes under ENet's default MTU (1400), the range coder beat 
gzip almost all the time, and was faster to boot. Of significant note is 
that I made the range coder table-less, i.e. it requires no initializing 
of any tables at all before compressing a packet, and never does any 
allocations at all and operates within a small fixed amount of memory. I 
wanted to avoid any setup/teardown time per packet that would have 
detracted from performance.

Lee

Philip Bennefall wrote:
> Hi Lee,
>
> Thank you very much for all the time and effort you are putting into 
> this library. I am about to integrate it into a game scripting engine, 
> and these new features will really come in handy. I'll be testing it 
> over the next few days, and will report any bugs or issues that I 
> find. I do have a quick question though. How does the built-in ENet 
> compressor compare to using an external library such as zlib, both in 
> terms of compression speed and ratios?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Philip Bennefall
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Salzman" <lsalzman1 at cox.net>
> To: "Discussion of the ENet library" <enet-discuss at cubik.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 11:56 PM
> Subject: [ENet-discuss] 1.2.2 and 1.3.0 *PRE*-release
>
>
>> So, I was playing around with packet compression for Sauerbraten 
>> using an adaptive range compressor. It turned out that did not work 
>> out so well on Sauerbraten's data, because I had already so tightly 
>> quantized it that the gains were small. But since the packet 
>> compressor was still good on other data besides Sauerbraten's and was 
>> of higher quality than other similar performing range compressors I 
>> could find, I decided to keep it in ENet.
>>
>> This also gave me a chance to break the protocol and introduce some 
>> various things, thus there will be a dual release of 1.2.2, which 
>> does not contain any protocol or API changes, and 1.3.0, which 
>> contains the packet compression changes amongst others. In 1.3.0 I 
>> also changed how session disambiguation works, to the effect that I 
>> cut down on packet header size (by 4 bytes) unless the user enables 
>> checksums.  Since I was free to break the API a bit, I did the 
>> specify channel limit on host creation thing, and also added a 
>> connect data field to connect events since someone wanted that a 
>> while ago. Also noteworthy is that even in 1.2.2, packet checksums 
>> can be enabled by setting a callback, no longer breaking binary 
>> compatibility of the longer amongst same-numbered builds, which 
>> should make it easier on those Linux distributions that distribute it 
>> as a shared library.
>>
>> So now I think the feature set is mostly complete, and I would like 
>> people to test the pre-release packages to make sure there are no 
>> issues with them, after which I will do a real release if everything 
>> is okay.
>>
>> 1.2.2 pre-release: http://lee.fov120.com/enet-1.2.2-not-released.tar.gz
>> 1.3.0 pre-release: http://lee.fov120.com/enet-1.3.0-not-released.tar.gz
>>
>> Note that CVS currently only contains the 1.2.2 changes. The 1.3.0 
>> pre-release was taken from my private Sauerbraten tree, and will only 
>> be stuffed into CVS when I am ready for the final release.
>>
>> Proposed ChangeLogs:
>> ENet 1.3.0 (May 20, 2010):
>>
>> * enet_host_create() now requires the channel limit to be specified as
>> a parameter
>> * enet_host_connect() now accepts a data parameter which is supplied
>> to the receiving receiving host in the event data field for a connect 
>> event
>> * added an adaptive order-1 range coder as a built-in compressor option
>> which can be set with enet_host_compress_with_range_coder()
>> * added support for packet compression configurable with a callback
>> * improved session number handling to not rely on the packet checksum
>> field, saving 4 bytes per packet unless the checksum option is used
>> * removed the dependence on the rand callback for session number 
>> handling
>>
>> Caveats: This version is not protocol compatible with the 1.2 series or
>> earlier. The enet_host_connect and enet_host_create API functions 
>> require
>> supplying additional parameters.
>>
>> ENet 1.2.2 (May 20, 2010):
>>
>> * checksum functionality is now enabled by setting a checksum callback
>> inside ENetHost instead of being a configure script option
>> * added totalSentData, totalSentPackets, totalReceivedData, and
>> totalReceivedPackets counters inside ENetHost for getting usage
>> statistics
>> * added enet_host_channel_limit() for limiting the maximum number of
>> channels allowed by connected peers
>> * now uses dispatch queues for event dispatch rather than potentially
>> unscalable array walking
>> * added no_memory callback that is called when a malloc attempt fails,
>> such that if no_memory returns rather than aborts (the default 
>> behavior),
>> then the error is propagated to the return value of the API calls
>> * now uses packed attribute for protocol structures on platforms with
>> strange alignment rules
>> * improved autoconf build system contributed by Nathan Brink allowing
>> for easier building as a shared library
>>
>> Caveats: If you were using the compile-time option that enabled 
>> checksums,
>> make sure to set the checksum callback inside ENetHost to enet_crc32 to
>> regain the old behavior. The ENetCallbacks structure has added new 
>> fields,
>> so make sure to clear the structure to zero before use if
>> using enet_initialize_with_callbacks().
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> ENet-discuss at cubik.org
>> http://lists.cubik.org/mailman/listinfo/enet-discuss 
>
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