3.20.10.0 Update Notes

The "network transport layer" is responsible for carrying data between your client and the server. Ever since 3.0 began development it was hardcoded to use Steam Networking V1, but is now being rewritten to support alternatives like the New Steam Networking V2, and generic sockets for offline LANs.

In order to narrow down bugs with the rewrite this update still defaults to the old Steam network, but contains a huge number of changes to the game-level netcode to support the transport refactor. If there are big issues with the update it will be rolled back, but it has been stable in beta so far.

Where possible, backwards compatibility with plugins has been maintained, but plugins doing unsupported things like modifying the network buffers will need to be fixed. This is an unfortunate side effect, however this rewrite is important for future netcode improvements.

If you host your own server and are feeling adventurous, you can try out the new Steam Networking V2 by including "-NetTransport=SteamNetworkingSockets" in your server command-line arguments.