Game-Networking-Resources VS GameNetworkingSockets

https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources (This is a list maintained by someone else, and it has some amazing things in it, and far more technical leaning than what I maintain).

When you play any kind of real-time online multiplayer game, it is physically impossible for all players to have the same view of the world. As a result, approximations have to be made, for example by extrapolating other player positions. There is plenty of research on this subject, and most modern games do a pretty good job. But when you add a second local player, things get a lot more complicated.

This collection of links is a gold mine, it’s how I learned almost all that I know: https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources

Game network programming mega compilation.

Looks like you are trying to find a Multiplayer solution, take a look at this guy's repo, he have a lot of resources about the topic https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources

Are there games that you could find and analyze? I wonder if old school games (or their multiplayer lobby servers) would be easy targets (I'm pretty sure a buddy said the Tribes 2 server protocol was really basic, but I could be very wrong.) A list of resources I found: https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources

https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources (This is a list maintained by someone else, and it has some amazing things in it, and far more technical leaning than what I maintain).

As this is a "side hobby project", and not your main thing, you're probably better off making your own server (but use a networking library and another other helpful libraries you can find). A starting point: https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources

Helpful resource: https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources

https://github.com/MFatihMAR/Game-Networking-Resources (This is a list maintained by someone else, and it has some amazing things in it, and far more technical leaning than what I maintain).

Steam does have a NAT traversal/punchthrough service too. It's apparently usable without Steam according to their README on https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets but honestly the only easy to use implementation I know is in Facepunch.Steamworks which requires a SteamID to initialize

Halo was mostly all about single player and early multiplayer/local multiplayer but their online netcode has sucked since Blood Gulch. Lots of games do networking horribly, I have been in gamedev making networking and I hate most of what people do. The ones that have a clean natting, based on enet style reliable UDP channels, RakNet style punch are better (RakNet was good until Facebook bought it). It has come a long way but also fallen back. Valve source netcode (on github) is probably the best and you can check it out here. They started with the best in Quake networking, then to Source.

There are some general APIs that are tied to Steam, like some networking stuff (even then there's an open source library), but the devs are not required to use any of those. If the devs chose to develop exclusively for steam and use their libraries, then that's their own decision.

Keep in mind that if you do go the GodotSteam route, there's GameNetworkingSockets from valve that doesn't have the requirement of needing Steam that you can use for releasing on other platforms. It has the same interface as the Steamworks SDK without requiring the Steamworks SDK.

Their UDP-but-connection-based game networking protocol can be used completely separetely from Steam (it also supports encryption). I think that does not include their relay networking solution, but still.. maybe it's helpful. They also have a TCP-like interface to make it easy to plug into an existing solution.

You can also use the non-Steam parts of that library in any game in case you don't just release on Steam (have a look at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets )

If you want to go the route of using a raw protocol and packing your messages yourself, I suggest to at least have a look at Valve's GameNetworkingSockets either for inspiration of what you might need or even to just use the library: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets

There is early NAT piercing support in Valve's GameNetworkingSockets. Check out:

You can also try Valve's GameNetworkingSockets with a serialization of your choice.