GameNetworkingSockets VS lidgren-network-gen3

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.

I use the NAT holepunching implementation in https://github.com/lidgren/lidgren-network-gen3 for my game, and it works without issues for most users.

I use the c# library lidgren for my game and it includes multiple techniques for managing the nat port forwarding issue. Most notably, nat hole punching. Highly recommended!

Heya, so I've been trying to restore the multiplayer functionality for the past week or so. Spent way to much time on this. I had to remake the whole thing over and over again because of issues.. Currently I didn't get much further than enabling an actual lobby. The main issue is that so much of the code to boot the game in online mode is obfuscated. Now to some information that might be useful for others, because honestly I never really did anything with c# and unity. Whenever you try to go into online mode the game connects to: world.gameaccounts.swordcoast.com Failing to get a proper response sets the game in offline mode. The full string is: private const string ࢩ = "wss://world.gameaccounts.swordcoast.com/scl/websocket/game_auth"; Also obfuscated and located in assembly-csharp.dll -> ngCloudServices Setting your host file to redirect world.gameaccounts.swordcoast.com to your local ip works but obviously we are missing the server. So once again we are failing to connect, setting the game to offline mode and locking all network functionality. GameConfig.json in the game folder mentions LAN Lidgrin which is actually a typo by the devs. The name of this library is Lidgren, see: https://github.com/lidgren/lidgren-network-gen3 I'm not sure if the config file really does anything since the webserver failure locks the game in offline mode. But the libaries are included in the game. As for debugging, output_log.txt in the data folder is actually quite useful to see where the code falls apart. For decompiling, editing and compiling your modified code use dnspy: https://github.com/VNGhostMans/dnSpyEx If someone is picking this up and needs more information about the games code structure and such let me know.

You definitely want to a low level API (LLAPI) instead, like f.ex. LiteNetLib, ENet, lidgren or similar. I haven't touched anyone of these recently, except the first one a year-ish ago, so I won't say anything about where they stand today.

Lidgren