[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hathora - Multiplayer Game Development Made...
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Show HN: Hathora - Multiplayer Game Development Made Easy
Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried
making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone
with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I
found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of
building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle
the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure
out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my
goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game
development into a framework so developers can simply focus on
implementing their game logic. Some technical pieces of Hathora I
wanted to highlight: - Hathora includes a system I think of as
"gRPC for games". You define your API in Hathora's declarative
format and the framework spits out typesafe data models, clients,
and server endpoint stubs across multiple programming languages
(although currently only Typescript is implemented). Minimal packet
sizes are achieved through a binary serialization format which
includes a delta encoding feature, allowing the framework to
efficiently synchronize state by sending data diffs. - Hathora
includes a Swagger-like Prototype UI generated from the API
definition. This allows you to view the game state and call server
methods all in realtime, letting you interact with your backend
logic without writing a single line of frontend code. Once you are
happy with the backend logic, you can create a fully custom
frontend using any framework/technology you'd like and just use the
Hathora client to communicate with the backend. - By handling
generic game functionality (state synchronization, messaging,
persistence, etc) for you, Hathora lets you create multiplayer
games with very few lines of code. For example, see chess which is
implemented in under 200 lines of user code:
https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/che.... I
also made (a massively simplified version of) Among Us in under 200
lines of code: https://github.com/hathora/among-us-tutorial I am
looking for developers interested in making online multiplayer
games to try out Hathora and give me feedback. Additionally, if the
roadmap seems interesting to you I would gladly welcome
contributions: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/roadmap. I'll be around
to answer questions, let me know what you think!
Author : hpx7
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-02-23 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.hathora.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.hathora.dev)
| StopDarkPattern wrote:
| Are they integrating with Easy Anti-Cheat?
| hpx7 wrote:
| The way I've thought about preventing cheating with Hathora is
| to make it server authoritative, and make it as simple as
| possible to validate client actions in the server.
| nsriv wrote:
| I'm far removed from this area of making software but I have to
| say I absolutely love the name ("Hammer" in Hindi)!
| geodel wrote:
| Just came to my mind if Hathora came from Thor or something.
| hashamali wrote:
| Looks interesting. We've evaluating multiplayer server frameworks
| at the moment and have decided on Nakama
| (https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama). Any thoughts on how
| Hathora compares? Particularly interested in the realtime
| multiplayer component, specifically around performance and
| scalability.
| hpx7 wrote:
| I think where Hathora shines today is in its ease of use, both
| in getting started and in managing complexity as you add
| features.
|
| That being said, there are a number of features that make
| Hathora performant and easy to scale for realtime multiplayer
| games -- you can read about some of them on the architecture
| page: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/architecture
|
| I plan on adding benchmarks in the coming weeks to better
| quantify perf and scalability
| hashamali wrote:
| Thanks, looking forward to the benchmarks!
| continuational wrote:
| I figure latency hiding the primary challenge in networked games.
| Does this framework help with that?
| hpx7 wrote:
| I've had decent results with just using client interpolation so
| far, you can try out pong, ship-battle, or among-us to get a
| feel for the latency.
|
| The latency will be even further improved once I add UDP
| support, and I also plan to write a library to make client
| prediction easier with Hathora.
| hoten wrote:
| When making the netcode for my web game, I highly valued
| TypeScript support so to get it by default, I defined the message
| types in TypeScript so they could be used directly[1]. I see that
| this framework defines its messages in .yml and converts it to
| types (stored in a folder kept out of source control).
|
| I'm not sure which way is best, but it is very nice to have the
| feature support of `.d.ts` files when creating complex message
| types, as opposed to needing to learn a new thing. Clearly if
| this is going to be a cross-platform framework (not just web)
| then using TypeScript as the source-of-truth makes far less
| sense.
|
| Anyway, very impressed with the binary format/delta encoding
| feature! That's been something that I know I _should_ do but am
| putting off until I see signs of sending raw JSON being
| problematic.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia/blob/master/src/proto...
| hpx7 wrote:
| Yeah I'm curious to see where people bump up against the limits
| of the yml types DSL. I plan to make a UI on top of the yml to
| make it a bit easier to work with as well. I think the
| popularity of Protobuf as a format shows that people are
| willing to learn a new API format if it adds enough value.
|
| Thank you for the feedback!
| thebeardisred wrote:
| It sounds very much like your stated goals ("...battle the
| network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure
| out how to make a scalable backend architecture") are very much
| in alignment with Agones (https://agones.dev) and it's sub-
| projects Quilkin (https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin),
| Open-Match (https://open-match.dev/site/), and Open-Saves
| (https://github.com/googleforgames/open-saves).
|
| Had you explored these at all?
| hpx7 wrote:
| I am familiar with Agones and I had briefly looked into
| leveraging Open-Match as a matchmaking option for Hathora.
|
| To me, part of the value Hathora adds is from being an
| integrated and easy to use solution where you don't need to
| figure out how to put the parts together in order to develop
| your game.
| skid_dancer wrote:
| From my understanding, Hathora is a netcode, so the layer
| handling communications between players through the server.
| Agones is for orchestrating the deployment/scaling of game
| servers, and Open Match is for matching players together, who
| will then join this server. So they are all complementary.
| Being in the industry, not a fan of Agones, and I barely hear
| of anyone using it. It solves the wrong problem, it's supposed
| to be a solution for game studios to handle scaling, but the
| only studios that have the resources to spend to understand,
| use and manage it already have their own solution in place.
| Open Match on the other hand is a great tool for matchmaking.
| speedysneakers wrote:
| dsiddharth wrote:
| This looks like a neat framework to build games quickly --
| congrats!
|
| I wonder how reliable the data store is since it's not using a
| traditional database. Mainly thinking about performance and
| consistency.
| hpx7 wrote:
| Right now Hathora writes game data locally to disk. This is
| nice for the local dev experience since you don't need to have
| a db running locally.
|
| For production use cases I've been mounting a networked drive
| (AWS EFS) to provide shared storage across nodes. It should be
| pretty easy add additional storage adapters (like Postgres) as
| well.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Well done! Maybe this will kick me to make a game I have been
| wanting to make for several years already.
| hpx7 wrote:
| If you do end up deciding to try Hathora out, feel free to join
| the Discord server - we'd love to see what you come up with!
| https://github.com/hathora/hathora#community
| matrixcubed wrote:
| I'm really rather excited to see _communication protocol as code_
| , however what sort of latency does having "Hathora-in-the-
| middle" incur?
|
| I'm particularly interested in the proposed GDscript support (to
| the level that I want to contribute), but I would recommend
| separating "packet validation" from "everything else", so that it
| could live inside a game-server without the necessary performance
| cost (however minimal) to an external actor.
| hpx7 wrote:
| Someone on the discord server already hacked together a
| multiplayer Godot game using Hathora!
|
| I'm not sure I understand the "Hathora-in-the-middle" piece --
| Hathora isn't quite a Backend-as-a-Service like Firebase if
| that's what you were thinking. Hop on the discord server if
| you're interested and I would be happy to chat in more detail.
| wsc981 wrote:
| Seems interesting.
|
| Would it be a lot of work to add a Lua interface? I think this
| tool could be very useful for indie devs working on LOVE/LOVR
| projects. I noticed Lua is not part of the roadmap.
|
| I worked on a pong clone last year and it was quite a pain to get
| the networking reasonably right. It would have been nice if a
| tool like Hathora could have been used instead.
|
| By the way, does Hathora support NAT hole punching?
| hpx7 wrote:
| Not sure if you saw it, but I wrote a little pong demo with
| Hathora in under 200 lines of code:
| https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/pon...
|
| Generating a Lua client should be very reasonable. If you'd be
| interested in contributing (or just want to follow along), feel
| free to jump on the discord!
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Very interesting!
|
| I think the scope is massive, multiplayer logic can differ quite
| a bit depending on what needs to happen.
|
| I've been using this project lately and I can recommend stealing
| from them. https://github.com/johanhelsing/matchbox
|
| Even then, you'd cover only some very specific use-cases of
| multiplayer game-making.
| hpx7 wrote:
| 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
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Really like what I'm seeing here! I wish instead of a YML file I
| could provide a `.d.ts` file and you could understand that. That
| would be much more natural for me to code in.
| hpx7 wrote:
| That's good feedback for me -- I've been thinking about other
| ways to define the API format, as manually editing the yml can
| be error prone. I've thought about making a simple point and
| click UI which generates a valid hathora.yml, but having the
| definition in a typesafe language also makes sense to me.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| To expound on this a bit, for an initial version it might not
| even need to actually do any type checking or even support
| `import`. You could literally just use a TypeScript AST in
| place of the YML structure. It's certainly not as nice as
| integrating with the actual TypeScript compiler, but since
| it's a code generator that generates TypeScript, it's not as
| if it actually needs to do the verification at that stage--it
| will already happen when the generated TypeScript gets
| compiled.
| jkchu wrote:
| I've gotten to know Harsh and we even built a game together with
| Hathora. We made a digital board game together in a week.
|
| I'm a dev that makes web games (gomobo.app) but I've always
| wanted to spend more time building the game logic and UI and less
| on the networking and infrastructure stuff. I think Hathora is a
| great way to make your next game idea wayyy faster.
| hpx7 wrote:
| Thanks Justin!
| 3327 wrote:
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