netcode.io VS Protobuf

yojimbo/ netcode/ reliable, all developped by Glenn Fidler, author of GafferOnGames

Man-in-the-middling the netcode. From what I can tell, this would work ... but the packets are encrypted. It appears the netcode is largely based on this library, that they sponsor. There appear to be some differences from the "standard" but there are too many similarities to not have a common ancestor. I got pretty far on this, just to at least verify there was encryption. Even if it is not encrypted, it appears to be a custom protocol.

I use netcode.io - if you have read gafferongames posts, this is made by the guy.

You may not be there yet with your developer skills but if you are curious you can have a look at the netcode source code. I'm not sure if they're still using it since the switch to Lumberyard and Amazon Services but it's a really good and strong codebase: https://github.com/networkprotocol/netcode

I found that there is a relatively new protocol called netcode.io that provides UDP-like connection between client-server.

If you want to learn more about networking for game in C++, Glenn Fiedler has great articles from the basics to advanced topics: https://www.gafferongames.com/ He also created a library for client-server networking: https://github.com/networkprotocol/netcode (He has a big name in networking, totally recommend reading his articles if you want to learn more about networking)

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.

One of the key feature of gRPC is protobuf .proto file(nothing but just a contract for me between two communicator code components) This file and protobuff compiler is so mature, then it generates a direct client implementation using protoccompiler. ref