Anet: A Network Game Programming Library

Anet (aka Activenet, Activlink) was created at Activision in 1995, and was used by various companies to create twenty-odd multiplayer games for MS-DOS, Macintosh, Windows 95, and Linux between 1995 and 2001. Activision has graciously agreed to release the source code for Anet under the GNU Lesser Public License.

Anet is a peer-to-peer networking system; it also supports a central chat server.

The source code is available here: anet-0.10.tar.gz.

Mailing List

There's now a mailing list for people who run anet servers; see groups.yahoo.com/group/anet-server, or send a message to [email protected] to join.

Crash Logger

anet includes a crash logging facility which may predate Great Circle Talkback. Here are the files involved:

doc/aeh.htm - documentation for the crash logging system
src/dp/dpexcept.c - exception handler
src/aeh/ - C code to upload crash logs
src/aeh/analaeh/ - C code to analyze crash logs
src/linux/crash - perl scripts to run web site summarizing all received crash logs
src/linux/crash/Readme.txt - a wee bit of doc about the web scripts

Note that it's highly intertwined with the game server code, so it would need a bit of work to extract and make useful in other situations.

Master List

A master list of games and servers is available at http://kegel.com/anet/master. Game servers can pull updates from that url. Please send updates to dank at kegel.com.