Welcome to kNet!

kNet is a low-level networking protocol library designed for bit-efficient realtime streaming of custom application-specified messages on top of TCP or UDP. kNet is written in C++.



   Supported Platforms.

kNet has been tested to build on the following platforms:
 - Windows 7 & Visual Studio 2010 Professional
 - Windows 7 & Visual Studio 2008 Standard
 - Ubuntu 9.04 & GCC 4.4.1



   Building kNet.

kNet uses cmake (2.6 or newer) as its build system. On Linux it can use pthreads or boost v1.38.0 or newer for threading support. On Windows a CMake flag USE_BOOST can be used to specify whether to depend on boost or not. By default USE_BOOST is on.

Windows:
 - Install cmake. 
 - Optional: Install and build Boost. Edit the root CMakeLists.txt to specify the source directory to boost path.
 - If you do not want to use Boost, edit the root CMakeLists.txt and comment out the USE_BOOST directive.
 - Optional: Download and install TinyXML. In TinyXML configuration, adjust the CRT runtimes to use the DLL versions. In the root CMakeLists.txt, uncomment #set(USE_TINYXML) and change TINYXML_ROOT to point to the TinyXML path.
 - If you do not want to use TinyXML, edit the root CMakeLists.txt and make sure the USE_TINYXML directive is commented out. This will disable the functionality of SerializedMessageList/MessageListParser though. 
 - Optional: kNet can use Qt to provider debug statistics and profiling windows. Install and build Qt (4.6.2 or newer recommended) and uncomment #set(USE_QT TRUE) in the root CMakeLists.txt.
 - Execute in project root folder the command 'cmake -G "Visual Studio 10"' (case sensitive!), or click the cmake_vs2010.bat.
 - If CMake fails to find your Qt installation, or if you want to explicitly specify the source location, set the QMAKESPEC and QTDIR environment variables or alter the cmake_vs2008.bat/cmake_vs2010.bat files.
 - Open and build the kNet.sln.

Linux:
 - Install Boost libraries and cmake.
 - If you want to use TinyXML, manually specify the TinyXML source directory to root CMakeLists.txt. Otherwise, comment out the USE_TINYXML directive.
 - If you want to use Qt, make sure USE_QT is defined in the root CMakeLists.txt. Otherwise, comment out that directive.
 - run 'cmake .' in kNet root folder.
 - run 'make'.

The project output files are placed in the directory kNet/lib.



   Contributors.

The following people have contributed to the project:

   Toni Alatalo
   Jukka Jylänki
   Erno Kuusela
   Ali Kämäräinen
   Jonne Nauha
   Ville Saarinen
   Cvetan Stefanovski
   Kari Vatjus-Anttila
   Lasse Öörni



   Links.

There exists a Wireshark dissector plugin for kNet: http://chiru.cie.fi/chiru-sharedfolder/knet-tundra-v.0.0.8.tar.gz .
A SCTP -enabled branch of kNet is being developed at https://bitbucket.org/karivatj/knet-sctp/ .