Introduction to Donet

Donet [1] ( /ˈdoʊ.net/ ) is a free and open source server software, designed for powering massive multiplayer online virtual worlds. The design of Donet focuses on solving five critical problems: Network culling, data persistence, security, reliability, and scalability.

The architecture of this project is inspired by the OTP (Online Theme Park) server, which was developed by Disney Interactive (formerly known as Disney VR Studios) and used from 2001 to 2013 to power massive multiplayer online games such as Toontown Online, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and others. Donet is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.

Donet is designed to distribute the workload of operating a virtual world (or online application) by separating it’s fundamental functions into different services. In a production environment, many instances of Donet can be running in different machines, each serving a specific role in the cluster while communicating with each other over the Donet protocol.