[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rivet - Open-source game server management ...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Rivet - Open-source game server management with Nomad and
Rust
Hey HN! Rivet is an OSS game server management tool that enables
game developers to easily deploy their dedicated servers without
any infra experience. We recently open-sourced Rivet after working
on it for the past couple of years. I wanted to share some of my
favorite things about our experience building this with the HN
community. My cofounder and I have been building multiplayer games
together since middle school for fun (and not much profit [1]). In
HS, I stumbled into building the entire infrastructure powering
[Krunker.io](http://Krunker.io) (acq by FRVR) & other popular
multiplayer web games. After wasting months rebuilding dedicated
server infrastructure + DDoS/bot mitigation over and over, we
started building Rivet as a side project. Some interesting
tidbits: - ~99% Rust and a smidgeon of Lua. - Bolt [2] - Cluster
dev & management toolchain for super configurable self-hosted Rivet
clusters. It's way over-engineered. - The entire repo is usable as
a library. Our EE repo uses OSS as a submodule. - Traefik used as
an edge proxy for low-latency UDP, TCP+TLS, & WSS traffic. -
Apache Traffic Server is under-appreciated as a large file cache.
Used as an edge Docker pull-through cache to improve cold starts &
as a CDN cache to lower our S3 bill. - ClickHouse used for
analytics & game server logs. It's so simple, I have nothing more
to say. - Serving Docker images with Apache TS is simpler &
cheaper than running a Docker pull-through cache. - Nebula has
been rock solid & easy to operate as our overlay network. - We use
Redis Lua scripts for complex, atomic, in-memory operations. -
Obviously, we love Nix. - We keep a rough SBOM [3]. - Licensed
under Apache 2.0 (OSI-approved). We seriously want people to run &
tinker with Rivet themselves. We get a lot of questions about this:
[4] [5] Some HN-flavored FAQ: > Why not build on top of Agones or
Kubernetes? Nomad is simpler & more flexible than
Agones/Kubernetes out of the box, which let us get up and running
faster. For example, Nomad natively supports multiple task drivers,
edge workloads, and runs as a standalone binary. >
[Fly.io](http://Fly.io) migrated off of Nomad, how will you scale?
Nomad can support 2M containers [6]. Some quick math: avg 8 players
per lobby * 2M lobbies * 8 regional clusters = ~128M CCU. That's
well above PUBG's 3.2m CCU peak. Roblox's game servers also run on
top of Nomad [7]. We're in good company. > Are you affected by the
recent Nomad BSL relicensing [8]? Maybe, see [9]. > How do you
compare to $X? Our core goal is to get developers up and running
as fast as possible. We provide extra services like our matchmaker
[10], CDN [11], and KV [12] to make shipping a fully-fledged
multiplayer game require only a couple of lines of code. No other
project provides a comparably accessible, OSS, and comprehensive
game server manager. > Do you handle networking logic? No. We
work with existing tools like FishNet, Mirror, NGO, Unreal & Godot
replication, and anything else you can run in Docker. > Is anyone
actually using this? Yes, we've been running in closed beta since
Jan '22 and currently support millions of MAU across many titles.
[1]: https://github.com/rivet-gg/microgravity.io [2]:
https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet/tree/main/docs/libraries/b...
[3]: https://github.com/rivet-
gg/rivet/blob/main/docs/infrastruct... [4]:
https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet/blob/main/docs/philosophy/...
[5]: https://github.com/rivet-
gg/rivet/blob/main/docs/philosophy/... [6]:
https://www.hashicorp.com/c2m [7]: https://www.hashicorp.com/case-
studies/roblox [8]: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-
adopts-business-sou... [9]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37084825 [10]:
https://rivet.gg/docs/matchmaker [11]: https://rivet.gg/docs/cdn
[12]: https://rivet.gg/docs/kv
Author : NathanFlurry
Score : 204 points
Date : 2023-08-19 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| eole666 wrote:
| Really cool! I'll consider it when launching my godot game. Is
| there any plan to support "relayed multi-player", with the actual
| game server being one of the players, and rivet in charge of
| match making and making the bridge between the remote players.
| Like nakama :
| https://heroiclabs.com/docs/nakama/concepts/multiplayer/rela...
| bcjordan wrote:
| OK, this is awesome. As a fellow game developer who learned to
| navigate the complexities of matchmaking and server orchestration
| the hard way (and begrudgingly), seeing Rivet open source a
| matchmaker and server orchestrator is exciting and honestly
| refreshing. For those outside of games, the use of modern webdev
| / infra tooling is frustratingly nascent, and production-ready
| OSS usable by smaller-than-AAA-sized studios is even more rare,
| just beginning to come online (the efforts behind https://game.ci
| are a recent shining example in game infra).
|
| I'm particularly encouraged here by the tools and approaches
| chosen -- Redis for matchmakers, ClickHouse for analytics/logs,
| Rust for speedy backend operations were tools I eventually came
| upon as best for the job after a long and painful process of
| iteration with inappropriate cloud dev tooling (with basically
| any datastore other than Redis you will run in to issues
| matchmaking).
|
| High traffic/concurrency in matchmaking is a hard problem when
| you need fast, consistent matches. Existing industrial-sized
| matchmakers (Google's OSS OpenMatch, AWS GameLift, etc.) require
| locking in to a very specific format or spinning up an entire K8S
| cluster, which for game devops teams already stretched thing is a
| tall ask). And for all that effort, you may discover the
| performance characteristics of their approaches aren't what you
| need, or (as has happened to us with different game web
| service/API/middleware providers) they may choose to abruptly
| deprecate the service upon which you built.
|
| Appreciate the dedication to making this available and the focus
| on helping gamedevs get up and running as fast as possible.
| Looking forward to playing around with Rivet and seeing where it
| might fit in our stack -- & would love to talk shop on this with
| anyone since I've been tortured by / interested in these problems
| while trying to simultaneously run a game studio / make new games
| / keep everything online the last few years!
| devbug wrote:
| This echos my experiences, especially with the move to "live
| services" model for games. Often the teams working on the
| services for multiplayer games are very small so it's all about
| leverage. They're also embedded within a culture that doesn't
| value or understand the practices and tools that are taken for
| granted in webdev, mostly because they're hard to transfer to
| the other domains in gamedev.
|
| I'm glad to see the open source development of these tools.
| Personally, there's a lot of stuff colleagues and I have built
| that I would love to see open sourced. Otherwise we just end up
| implementing the same services over and over again.
|
| Another example is patch delivery. It's a solved problem yet
| everyone keeps rolling their own, or only shipping to Steam. Of
| course, all managed with some Jenkins scripts written by
| someone that's no longer at the company. I want Fastlane for
| games that makes it easy to target the various distribution
| channels across desktop/mobile/console.
| NKissel wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience and kind words -- we would
| always be happy to talk shop. I think it's a shame that current
| infra solutions prevent a lot of hobbyists and studios from
| ever launching a multiplayer games, I would love to see it as
| prolific as single player experiences.
| singinwhale wrote:
| I would be interested in knowing how this compares to Epic Online
| Services (EOS). We use EOS for connecting P2P lobbies and doing
| server browsing. When using unreal that service is basically
| free. Managing game servers is of course not part of the EOS
| package but it's a big question if your game really needs
| dedicated servers or could do with p2p lobbies. Running your own
| servers is quite expensive after all. Also console support is
| also always a concern for us so whether they check all the boxes
| so we can use them inside the console ecosystem would be very
| important to know.
| [deleted]
| redgetan wrote:
| wow, this is really cool, i remember krunker going viral when it
| was launched and how smooth it was. definitely one of the top IO
| games. so really cool that you're opensourcing this
| waughpew wrote:
| So glad to see open source. Bold step.
| [deleted]
| riku_iki wrote:
| given nomad is under business license now, can Hashi come after
| you?
| [deleted]
| whatsdoom wrote:
| they address this in the original post:
|
| >> Are you affected by the recent Nomad BSL relicensing [8]?
|
| > Maybe, see [9].
|
| And then
|
| > [9]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37084825
| riku_iki wrote:
| so, they won't receive security updates after Dec.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| When you say open source, do you mean that I can self host
| everything and not use your rivet.gg SaSS for anything?
|
| What are the features only available in SaSS? Do you anticipate
| to have new features only for SaSS users? Is there a policy for
| releasing SaSS features to open source users?
| nravic wrote:
| This is so cool! Out of curiosity, could you walk through your
| decisionmaking around using Nix and how it fits in with Rivet?
| Brighthurst wrote:
| Wow, this is super cool. As a hobbyist game dev, I really hope to
| see bevy support soonish, as it has a dedicated community and is
| also Rust-based. Or rather, a rust crate for whatever rust-based
| engine wants to use it. Rust-based game engines show a lot of
| promise so I think the crate would be a worthwhile endeavor
| NKissel wrote:
| We plan to at some point -- being engine agnostic is one of our
| goals.
| jordo wrote:
| Open sourced - nice!
| opportune wrote:
| Very cool, I have an abandoned web game side project and may try
| to run it on this!
|
| One question, am I correct in understanding you bake in the
| assumption that 1 lobby = 1 container? I can see how that'd be
| desirable for the nice properties it gives you architecturally
| but if your game isn't very demanding (mine's turn based) might
| that end up stranding a lot of resources?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Nice to see some more good press for Nomad. IMHO it's superior to
| Kubernetes for most use cases.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Cool project (based on me skimming the documentation). I'm a
| hobbyist game dev whose been attempting a deploy of a simple
| multiplayer game on AWS, specifically gamelift, for about four
| months.
|
| Turns out I thought I knew more than I really did thus I've been
| spending much of my hobbyist time learning more AWS. I'm pretty
| stubborn about a local dev experience which takes time to
| establish an appropriate mental model to do. So it goes. Pro tip:
| find your application "interfaces" and discover what tooling can
| be used instead of a cloud resource (e.g. a mongoDB compatible
| document database is the interface to which AWS DocumentDB and
| MongoDB are concrete implementations). I have a docker compose
| file I use for local dev. It's the best setup I've found for
| myself but I am open for advice.
|
| Anyways I'd just like to voice myself as a possible target
| audience. Being able to develop locally is important to me and
| the hardest parts with AWS is having little support on how
| exactly to do this. Assuming this is even a fair ask to make...
|
| P.S. another pro tip; I use Unity + Mirror networking for my
| multiplayer games. GameLift requires code integrated into your
| game code for it to function. I use nested prefabs to handle two
| cases: (1) when I want gamelift code to execute and (2) when I
| just want to focus on writing the multiplayer code. My production
| code uses (1) and I usually do development in (2). (2) is a child
| of (1).
|
| P.P.S. GameLift has a lag of about 2-3 minutes when registering
| my running game server in Unity editor with a "gamelift anywhere
| fleet" before it can receive traffic. I didn't know about this
| for a while and stressed out over the inconsistency. Make sure to
| measure timings on this so you don't go crazy.
| NathanFlurry wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words and tips!
|
| > Anyways I'd just like to voice myself as a possible target
| audience
|
| Local development is tricky, and we have plenty of room for
| improvement here.
|
| Currently we provide a special developer token [1] which will
| cause API endpoints to return mock responses when used locally.
| This way, you can use the exact same API with no difference in
| production & locally, so you don't have to mess with nested
| prefabs.
|
| However, this doesn't help much with exposing your local
| machine for testing. We've toyed around with the idea of
| something similar ngrok built in to our Rivet CLI and
| integrated in to the API.
|
| [1]: https://rivet.gg/docs/general/concepts/dev-tokens#mock-
| respo...
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| To be honest I do wonder if my fixation with local
| development is even justifiable. Looking around at projects
| and documentation I do get the sense that local dev is not a
| priority, and maybe that isn't a bad thing. Amazing projects
| exist. Perhaps other game devs are more resourceful than I am
| and simply build, working around limitations.
|
| I do enjoy learning and this constraint requires I deeply
| learn. However there is an opportunity cost.
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| Nice to see this open source :)
| [deleted]
| Thaxll wrote:
| The fact that this solution is based on nomad is a big red flag:
|
| - no updates after December
|
| - you probably won't have the right to use nomad after that
|
| - every providers offer Kubernetes managed solution, by using
| nomad now you're pushing that burden to host and manage infra
| since no one is offering nomad services
|
| Using Kubernetes is a huge advantage since all the dev ops tool
| can run on it, it's tested and everyone is using it.
|
| As for more flexible than Agones I highly doubt that, do you have
| example?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Kuberentes is such an overengineered disaster. In 10 years,
| everyone is going to wake up with a hangover and pretend they
| never heard of it. Anyone here built a SOAP system? Of course
| not, you would _never_.
| kapilvt wrote:
| fwiw re [9] and nomad w/ HashiCorp license changes, the
| referenced sbom https://github.com/rivet-
| gg/rivet/blob/main/docs/infrastruct...
|
| lists nomad as apache 2.0, when its either MPL or BUSL depending
| on version.
|
| also fwiw, your ci is failing, because your secrets detection ci
| hook is barfing on recently updated click house sha 256 in your
| nix file.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-19 23:00 UTC)