[HN Gopher] Modern cloud for multiplayer games ___________________________________________________________________ Modern cloud for multiplayer games Author : hpx7 Score : 134 points Date : 2022-06-30 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.hathora.dev) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.hathora.dev) | beebeepka wrote: | Deceptive title. Almost triggered me but this looks like a cool | project. Hosting game servers isn't as trivial as it used to be. | | Back in the day all you had to do was execute a command with a | given config. Man, hosting Quake 3 servers was stupid easy. These | days I need middlewere such as LinuxGSM in order to deploy an | instance of Quake Live. Just one, though... because reasons. | | I know why things are complicated these days. I really do. But it | sucks | HacklesRaised wrote: | Might be worth a conversation with Glen Fieldlers crew, perhaps a | less naive presentation might follow. | 101008 wrote: | Interesting article! Congrats on the launch. But as an ocassional | gamer I thought the way online games work was different. | | For example, I play FIFA online and I believed that once a match | making had place, Player A (me) synced a seed with Player B, and | then the only thing that had to go over the network was the | input, and every device could generate the game since they shared | the same seed (which makes it deterministic). | | Isn't much more complicated to have the engine on the server and | send the state to the device? | semitones wrote: | It's easier to prevent cheating if the engine is on the server. | Could you elaborate on what you mean by | | > they shared the same seed (which makes it deterministic) | | In addition to game init params (like random seeds), the game | state is also a function of time, which cannot be synchronized | the same way that seeds can. | ladberg wrote: | The vast majority of games don't work the way you're talking | about. I think the only ones that do are fighting games where | latency is crucial. | | It's much more complicated to only share input because to avoid | desync the game engine has to be able to either rollback the | state to accept inputs from other players sent over a slow | connection, or alternatively just pause the game until it | receives the next tick's inputs. See this article: | https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti... | [deleted] | CJefferson wrote: | I can't find any details on the actual protocol, and what | features it supports. | | In real-time multiplayer games, we often need to worry about | dynamic latency adjustment, prediction and rollback. Are any of | these built-in? | hpx7 wrote: | For an example Hathora game that does client prediction and | rollback, take a look at https://github.com/ourcade/flappy- | bird-hathora | CJefferson wrote: | Thanks, that is a really interesting example. | | I am a bit worried by "Dropped or lost input packets are also | not handled in this example.", as I would have hoped handling | dropped + lost packets would be a framework issue, not a "me" | issue. | hpx7 wrote: | I'm not the author of the game so not sure exactly what | they meant by that, but that game uses Websockets which are | built on top of TCP, so developers shouldn't have to deal | with dropped packets (and our UDP implementation will have | automatic retry built in as well) | Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote: | Nice read-up, learnt a lot, thanks ! | hyperionplays wrote: | How is this different to say OneQode[0]? | | [0] https://oneqode.com | sebular wrote: | I was excited by Hathora and sat down to integrate it into a | project I'm working on, only to find that it only supports | Websockets. | | Given the inherent latency of using TCP-based messaging, it feels | odd to advertise this as being good for real time games. | | I see that UDP is on the roadmap, so that's good. Will you | support WebRTC for building low latency real time gaming | experiences on the web? | hpx7 wrote: | Hathora actually supports raw TCP connections in addition to | Websockets, and we're very close to shipping raw UDP support as | well! | | For the web, we're deciding between using WebRTC or | leapfrogging straight to WebTransport[0]. Either solution would | be a thin layer on top of the raw UDP work | | [0] https://web.dev/webtransport/ | barnabask wrote: | I'm rooting for you guys, truly. Congrats on the launch and | thanks for offering a free trial. | | However... personally I clicked around looking for pricing, found | nothing. I understand it's early and you don't have it figured | out yet, that's fine. I get it will cost more than if I tried to | roll my own solution on bare metal, sure. But how much more? | AFAIK it will be somewhere between ten cents and a billion | dollars a month, or per player, or cats per donut, who knows. | | I'm starting to think that new services silently loose far more | users through the uncertainty of opaque or nonexistent pricing | ("contact us!") than they will gain with free trials. | dsiddharth wrote: | Hathora Cloud is still very young and iterating quickly. We've | been in a private beta with select design partners and we're | onboarding users slowly via signups. | | When we make it generally available, we will definitely make | pricing front and center! | Shadonototra wrote: | nodejs server for games = how to burn your money fast world | record | | the money people coming telling game devs how to make their | servers to become inefficient | | little do they know | valbaca wrote: | from what I can tell, the NodeJS server was a trivial example | of the _customer 's_ server, not their implementation. they | take in docker containers | thruflo wrote: | This is really cool. It takes a hard domain -- multiplayer -- and | makes it much more accessible. | | I think the docs link is a great intro: https://docs.hathora.dev | [deleted] | dsiddharth wrote: | Hi HN -- CEO of Hathora here. We've spent most of our careers in | infrastructure and are excited to modernize the gaming stack. | | Happy to answer any questions :) | dijit wrote: | Interesting product; I am also working in this space on a | similar concept though geared towards AA/II gamedevelopers. | | I didn't get a good grasp, however, of how it compares to | something like Photon: https://www.photonengine.com/ | CobrastanJorji wrote: | Is Hathora a product? The blog post mentions a free tier, which | is great, but I can't find any references to any pricing or | tier information at all, or even a link to buy something. | There's documentation showing how to run a dev server locally, | but, like...what happens then? | | Does Hathora have any customers? It says "scale to millions." | Has anyone ever used Hathora to scale to millions of something? | jkchu wrote: | Not dsiddharth, but for what it's worth I am using Hathora | for my upcoming game (it's almost complete!). Their product | still very new, but they have been extremely helpful with | every step of the process building with Hathora. | | They have two products - an open-source dev framework (free) | and a cloud-hosting product (paid). | | My games will likely never reach millions players, but my | first two games led to over 1,000 sign-ups and I've made over | $1k in revenue (which I'm super proud of). I can report back | with how my newest game does after it launches. | iAmAPencilYo wrote: | That's really cool - possible to llshow the two games that | you've built already with Hathora? | jkchu wrote: | My first two games were built with my own hacky web | sockets implementation. From a software perspective it's | pretty messy, but it gets the job done haha. | | I actually had built an alpha version of my 3rd game with | my own networking code, but because it is more of a real- | time game, there were tons of bugs. Switching to use | Hathora for the back-end logic has made the game much | more stable so I can finally work to release the game. | | You can check out my first two games here: | https://gomobo.app/. They play kind of similar to Jackbox | games, but with more strategy board game elements. Would | love to hear what you think! | [deleted] | chrisfosterelli wrote: | No questions but I love the illustrations on this post. Nice | work! | 0des wrote: | Can you enable ShowDead and answer XeonMC's question? Seems | like a normal question, not sure how the user got in the spam | filter. Happens a lot these days to otherwise normal questions. | [deleted] | xeonmc wrote: | So this is basically a fancy game-specific VPN isn't it? How is | it different from Steam Networking which lets players connect | to their closest endpoint and routes traffic through Valve's | backbone? The only way this service could offer any benefit | over Valve's is if you can run edge processing right at the | gateway for a Matrix.org-esq protocol for a distributed- | authority netcode so that the gameclient's physics/hit- | prediction length is only the latency to its gateway rather | than all the way to the central authoritative server. But then | this would need gamedevs to actually know what they're doing | regarding how to re-architect netcode, which, given the quality | of Riot's Valorant supposedly being the shining beacon of | engineering among gamedevs, is not a very auspicious prospect. | gopher_space wrote: | You're missing the external requirements a game might have. | Multiplatform? Multiplatform with shared online play? | Publisher wants certain services? Publisher already has its | own services? Service sucks to actually work with? | YarickR2 wrote: | Well, matchmaking and lobby is at least as important as | connectivity ; not every multiplayer game requires absolutely | flawless connectivity and pings in tens of ms, but every | multiplayer game requires some kind of a player profile , and | many of those games have a notion of "match", and "players | participating in a match", thus requiring a matchmaking based | on some rules, most often those are player level and user | location. Almost every game I, as an ops engineer, took part | in launching and running, was implementing those two parts, | with varying degrees of success and finesse | sgtnoodle wrote: | Does anyone remember Microsoft's matchmaking system back in | the 90's? MSN The Zone or something like that? It was | terrible! :-) | dsiddharth wrote: | I'm not too familiar with Steam Networking, but at a glance | here are some differences: | | - Steam Networking seems mostly for peer-to-peer messaging, | so it's closer to a STUN server (used by WebRTC for sending | UDP datagrams). It's excellent for sending messages over | high-quality links, but if you want to run server side logic, | it doesn't seem like Steam Networking will help much. | | - On the flip side Hathora is a server-authoritative | framework, which can run arbitrary game code on our | infrastructure. This is closer to a cloud provider. The | difference between us and just using AWS or DO is that we're | providing the "Steam Networking"-like edge network out of the | box and tailoring our use case to the needs of game devs. | | - Lastly, we can actually spin up compute infra at the edge | if enough of your users are originating from a location far | from the rest of your servers. Let's say your game starts to | go popular in Asia today, our routing layer is smart enough | to launch a server in Singapore instead of connecting users | to far away game servers. | [deleted] | njaremko wrote: | What differentiates this from a more general solution like | fly.io? It seems like what's being provided is an auto-scaling | docker deployment with fast cross region network links, and | storage? Fly provides all of that, and isn't focused on gaming. | Why would I choose Hathora? | paulgb wrote: | If you look at the cli screencast, it appears to be using fly | under the hood. | dsiddharth wrote: | Yep, we love Fly.io! We're building our platform-as-a-service | on top of Fly and augmenting it for gaming-specific needs. | hpx7 wrote: | Hathora Cloud provides several important features specific to | multiplayer gaming. To list a few: | | 1) Built in authentication/identity | | 2) Session/room based connections (with lobbies, matchmaking, | etc) | | 3) Handlers for various transports (websocket, TCP, UDP) | DaiPlusPlus wrote: | So you're competing with Azure Playfab... so are those | services you mentioned just now available a-la-carte or is it | an all-or-nothing approach? (as in, can you use your | sessions/rooms without using your IdP / can we bring our own | IdP (using OIDC? SAML?) - or is your room system built around | your IdP? | | Websockets are very different to BSD Sockets (TCP/UDP/etc) | though (string messages vs. binary packets/datagrams) - if | you're abstracting-away then that means devs are ceding a lot | of control over the performance dials (TCP_NODELAY? Nagle?) | | The example in the article using a Node.js-based game-server | is fine, but what options do people needing to run a Quake- | style game server (i.e. a ph-phat binary) have? | [deleted] | hpx7 wrote: | Hathora's auth story is basically bring your own JWT token. | So you can implement your own custom auth as long as you | end up with a JWT signed using your APP_SECRET in the end. | | Websockets do actually support binary packets not just | strings. But yes you lose control over the server side | receiver part of the connection (we think most developers | will be ok with this) | | Hathora Cloud will be able to run anything that can be | packaged into a Docker container and implement the Hathora | Protocol (yet to be formally documented) | hpx7 wrote: | If anyone wants to try out a game I made using Hathora for a | recent gamejam, you can check out star-jump: | https://hpx7.itch.io/star-jump | | It's a 2d multiplayer platformer using Phaser[0] for physics on | the backend, and it's hosted on Hathora Cloud! | | [0] https://phaser.io/ | themanmaran wrote: | FYI the "Submission to ...ll Submissions! banner blocks part of | the game window. | nomel wrote: | Can anyone else confirm that this doesn't work in Safari 15.4? | hpx7 wrote: | Try https://hpx7.itch.io/ship-connect if you want to see a | mobile friendly Hathora game (made for a different gamejam) | | Edit: I realize now you're talking about desktop Safari. | Star-jump doesn't seem to work on it for some reason, will | have to investigate why... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-30 23:00 UTC)