TNet (Tasharen Networking) started off as a networking solution for the Unity Engine. I created it back in 2012 because the game I was working on needed a solid net code foundation. At the time, Unity's built-in solution was severely lacking and Photon was only getting started (and its CCU limit approach did not sound appealing). Not long after initial release I realized that the way I approach networking made TNet an excellent tool for game state persistence, making it possible to add save game feature without any extra effort. The handy DataNode class in particular, offers a hierarchical approach to data similar to XML, but in a much easier to read text format, and offers serialization in plain text, binary and LZMA-compressed data formats. Nowadays, I use TNet in all of my own projects for both multiplayer and serialization, and as such it's still actively tweaked, yet remains fully backwards compatible with projects created 12+ years ago.

As of this writing (October 2025), TNet is now free and open source.

-Michael "Aren" Lyashenko

discord.gg/tasharen