Steamworks SDK v1.44 - New Networking APIs

[tadrinth]

New networking APIs from Steam:

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1791775741704351698

For the past few years we have been working on improving the quality of multiplayer experiences in DotA and CS:GO by relaying the traffic and carrying it on our network backbone. This protects our gameservers from denial-of-service attacks and gives players all over the world a lower-latency, higher-quality connection.

Today we are releasing APIs that make this service available to all Steam partners. This gives you:
Access to our network, giving your players protection from attack, 100% reliable NAT traversal, and improved connectivity.
Tools for instantly estimating the ping between two arbitrary hosts without sending any packets.
A high quality end-to-end encrypted reliable-over-UDP protocol.

These updates are available as part of the Steamworks SDK v1.44 release, available now.

Might help with certain multiplayer features.

[x4000]

While I would love this, this still requires a Steam account and some people would consider this DRM.  I don't think that GOG and similar would go for it, for instance.  It's frustrating, because while that would be a great tool, we can't use it because we'd just have to make a second implementation that uses non-Steam stuff, anyway.  Blah.