geckos.io VS quilkin

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

Quilkin should work for this. Set up one client on your VPS, then set up a second client on a host somewhere inside your network. Connect both instances together and have the host on your network forward traffic to the 27016 endpoint

The firewall would need to be able to handle all the DDoS traffic as well, since your current idea would still pass the game server's IP back to a client. This is doable if you're hosting on a cloud provider and let their firewalls filter the traffic before hitting the game server.

Embark Studios recently open sourced (in alpha) a UDP proxy[1] designed for games that lets you implement a load balancing layer. This allows you to remove servers in the load balancing layer in the event that it comes under attack, allowing the game server to stay up and only having to disconnect a portion of players connected to the attacked loadbalancer. Having a proxy layer is also how Steam protects game servers using the Steam Datagram Relay[2].

[1]: https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin