Libplanet is a .NET library for creating multiplayer online game in decentralized fashion, which means the whole gameplay occurs on a peer-to-peer network among equal nodes rather than an authorized central server. Under the hood, it incorporates many features (e.g., digital signature, BFT consensus, data replication) of a blockchain.
It has competitive advantages over other solutions for decentralized gaming:
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Embeddable: A game app does not have to communicate with another running process, hence it doesn't require extra marshaling or processes management. To draw a parallel, Libplanet is closer to SQLite than MySQL or PostgreSQL.
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Isomorphic: Libplanet is a .NET library, so every game logic can be written in the same language, C#, and run on the blockchain. No glue code or "smart contracts" are needed.
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Token-independent: Unlike almost every blockchain system, it does not force users to create and deal with yet-another-cryptocurrency. Your game can be free to play, and enjoyed by regular gamers.
To learn more about why Planetarium is creating technology for fully decentralized games, please refer to our blog post.
For every stable release, we pack Libplanet into a .nupkg and upload it to NuGet and GitHub releases page. (You can find the changelog for versions from releases page.) To use Libplanet in your game, your project needs to add a dependency to Libplanet package. On Visual Studio IDE, run the following command in Package Manager Console:
Install-Package Libplanet
If you prefer dotnet CLI run the following command instead:
dotnet add package LibplanetSee also Microsoft's docs on different ways to install NuGet package.
In addition to stable releases, we also provide pre-release packages. For every day and every merge commit, it is packed into a .nupkg and uploaded to NuGet with a hyphen-suffixed version name.
For a merge commit build, a version name is like 0.1.0-dev.20181231235959
where 20181231235959 is a UTC timestamp of the build.
For a daily build, a version name is like 0.1.0-nightly.20181231.
Unfortunately, Unity currently does not support NuGet. There are some Unity plug-ins to deal with NuGet package system, and these seem immature at present. To use Libplanet on Unity, you need to manually extract Libplanet.dll from Libplanet.*.nupkg file and place it inside of your Unity project. We are acknowledging the fact Libplanet is currently not very usable together with Unity, and promise to make it better in the next few minor releases. Until then, you could try MSBuildForUnity which is experimental as of January 2020.
You could build Libplanet.dll and Libplanet.Stun.dll assemblies from the source code.
The following command installs dependencies (required library packages) and builds the whole Libplanet solution:
dotnet buildNote that dotnet command is distributed together with .NET Core SDK.
If you'd like to contribute code to the Libplanet project in earnest, please read our contributor guide.