[HN Gopher] Modern cloud for multiplayer games
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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...
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(page generated 2022-06-30 23:00 UTC)