KuroNet

Introduction

A Garry's Mod module that allows to send virtually infinitely long data (default limit is 16MB, see more in the limitations section) by chunking it over the network, based on the original Garry's Mod net library. Functions for sending tables included, defaulting to encoding them using the JSON functions that come with GMod. It's very easy to change this, and it's pretty straightforward.

Examples can be found at the beginning of the lua script.

This uses an indexing system to make sure messages arrive in order, in case it may for some reason happen they don't; essentially, all chunks carry an index value that is used to properly join everything later on.

Use cases

• Some administrative plugins back in the day (probably still today) allowed admins to take screenshots from an user's game, and it was then streamed back to the admin for detecting any weird cheats. This was not possible without some kind of chunking, and this library can technically be used for the same purpose.
• Allowing users to type incredibly long text data, such as when editing a book for roleplay gamemodes or writing blog posts on internet-like gameplay systems.
• More? Yeah, probably more.

Limitations

The max total amount of data (without accounting for "header" information of the chunk) that can be sent over in a single request is the value of the maxBytes variable * the kNet.maxParts variable, by default it's 64KB * 256, meaning 16MB. The maxBytes value is not meant to be changed due to GMod limitations. This was (11 years ago) and still is the maximum allowed. Unless GMod increases the limit, this value should not be changed, but feel free to check here for any changes.

Configuration

Minor edits of the lua file allow to change things such as the max bytes of each chunk, the server timeout, etc. Table encoding functions can be changed too.

kNet.maxParts = 256 -- Max number of chunks that can be sent over. Can be changed, but this reduces the amount of actual data sent over the chunk. Should always be a power of two to maximize data efficiency.
kNet.maxNameLength = 64 -- Max length of the name key of the kNet request. Can be changed, but this reduces the amount of actual data sent over the chunk.
kNet.encode = util.TableToJSON -- Table encoding function, replace with pON or glON if needed.
kNet.decode = util.JSONToTable -- Table decoding function, replace with pON or glON if needed.