geckos.io VS builder

First, I would try exchange Socket.io over Geckos - https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io.

I agree the scope is massive. I think a lot of people struggle with figuring out how to even get started with multiplayer dev, and I hope Hathora can be a useful tool for them.

Thanks for linking matchbox - I've been looking into https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io as a way to integrate WebRTC into Hathora

https://github.com/pion/datachannel looks great! Thank you for sharing your project with the open source community.

I just starred it, it does seem like it'd alleviate a some of the pain. Another similar (more end to end) project I had come across is: geckos.io. This previous HN thread[1] discusses some of the (at least perceived) difficulty with using WebRTC as a "WebSockets but UDP" solution.

I'm not sure I follow the concern about congestion control. UDP doesn't have it either, presumably since if you're building an application that requires such latency sensitivity, you don't mind rolling your own congestion control algorithm that makes most sense given your application's specific needs, right? Pretty much all FPS games do this, as far as I understand.

[0] https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io

We have a partnership with Hathora (https://hathora.dev/) so that our infrastructure can scale globally with high performance so we can provide the best user experience possible despite the realities of playing games over the internet. We also have some big plans around using rollback that we've covered elsewhere that we're cautiously optimistic about.

For multiplayer/server-less games, try Hathora

I cofounded Hathora (https://hathora.dev/) last year and we've been working on making it easier for smaller teams and individual developers to build scalable multiplayer games. We think the serverless model is the simplest approach, allowing you to dynamically provision a new instance of your game server when users or your matchmaker requests a new session.

We made this .io style demo to showcase this approach, and we're releasing the source code and documentation alongside with it.

Hey I'm the creator of https://hathora.dev/ which aims to provide a super simple deployment and scaling experience for session-based games. It's based on containers and can deploy any kind of game server. Check it out and see if it meets your needs!

At Hathora, our mission is to make it easier for developers to build, launch, and scale multiplayer games. One of the core technologies we have built is the Hathora Coordinator, which is our fully managed multi-tenant implementation of a Stateful Router.

Hi there! I started a company this year focused on multiplayer server infrastructure. We also built a multiplayer game framework for Typescript that has gotten 400+ stars on Github in the past few months: https://github.com/hathora/hathora

Would love to connect and exchange notes about multiplayer development -- if you're interested, my email is on my profile.

I've been working on my own realtime networking engine[0] and I think there are a few important points related to network syncing that are not mentioned in this article:

1) Bandwidth. The users internet can only handle so much network throughput, so for fast paced games (where you're sending data to each client at a rate of 20+ frames per second) it becomes important to optimize your per-frame packet size. This means using techniques like binary encoding and delta compression (only send diffs).

2) Server infrastructure. For client-server games, latency is going to be a function of server placement. If you only have a single server that is deployed in us-east and a bunch of users want to play with each other in Australia, their experience is going to suffer massively. Ideally you want a global network of servers and try to route users to their closest server.

3) TCP vs UDP. Packet loss is a very real problem, and you don't want clients to be stuck waiting for old packets to be resent to them when they already have the latest data. UDP makes a major difference in gameplay when dealing with lossy networks.

[0] https://github.com/hathora/hathora

I built a bunch of multiplayer games in the past and am now working on a framework to try and make it easier for others to do so: https://github.com/hathora/hathora