GameNetworkingSockets VS nakama

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.

nakama: https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

To add more detail on the recent work on the ZHeap storage engine. We (Heroic Labs) sponsored work for the Cybertec team to bring it up to date with latest improvements and changes with Postgres' pluggable storage engine:

you can do that, but for what platform? html5? windows? android?, the most easiest way is use firestore a service from firebase (offer a free tier), it is the easiest way not the better, other way is use a service like nakama that is more professional and something in the middle can be mmm pocketbase or supabase.

I recommend the backend solution called Nakama since you’re using Godot: https://heroiclabs.com/

You could create all this yourself, or you can use existing solutions which handle all this (and much more I didn't mention). One that I'm aware of that works with Godot is Nakama. They have a paid hosting option, or you can host the application yourself.

I read using nakama server for this is convinient. https://heroiclabs.com/

Does anyone have recommendations on what to use? I've done a bit of research and found https://heroiclabs.com/. It's a bit unclear to me if it actually supports server side state because it talks about 'hosts' a bit, but I think it does...and it seems like you can host it yourself to avoid the $600 a MONTH! pricetag. But any other recommendations? Has anyone used heroic before?

You might be interested in Nakama server from https://heroiclabs.com/

Depending on how much effort you want to put in to this, you might consider something like Nakama: https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

There have been mentions of Normcore, Fish-Net, and Nakama as well.