Networking in games is pure suffering.
You start with “just a simple relay server.” (alone let authoritative servers) Just a few sockets. A couple messages. Clean. Few hours later: you’re debugging why one packet arrives in the future, one in the past, and one simply refuses to exist. You forget the game. The game forgets you. Now it’s just you, a growing pile of networking code, and a silent client that definitely connected but somehow didn’t. You promise yourself: “just one more fix” Congratulations. You are now in a long-term relationship with a race condition. Days pass. You no longer render frames. You render logs. At some point, you question reality: “is UDP unordered, or am I?” Eventually, you accept it. There is no game. There never was. Only packets. Only retries. Only pain.
Dakara watashi ga anata o sukutte agemashou
This will be a very simple AND opinionated game network libray not a daemon
(You will still need to embed it in a server wrapper or something, and also this is not a Authoritative server library, thought it can be made with more hooks and callbacks, but the main point is effortlessly broadcasting with high tick rate and low-memory usage)
Note: This is very experimental. I am making this for learning networking and get familiar with tokio ecosystem, but I will try to make it as usable as possible
Checkout: Examples for usage cases and Docs for right way to use this library
Usage (I don't like release cycles and versioning, so just use local)
[dependencies]
game-server = { git = "https://github.com/ronakgh97/ghost-sync" }
- Tick rate: 12 hz
- Bot-client: 128
N * R msg/second for each broadcast, so (N - 1) * (N * R) msg/second in total broadcast
That's 195,072 msg/second with 512 mb buffer channel
NOTE: This is performed on single machine, so backpressure warns are excepted, as if even clients is slightly slower than server, the writer channel buffer starts to fill up fast and drop frames
(frames drop are negligible, since its on localhost - less latency)which is expected behavior, not a bug due to test env & synthetic traffic.
Resources
- https://github.com/rumaniel/Awesome-Game-Networking
- https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture.html
- https://medium.com/@jayphelps/backpressure-explained-the-flow-of-data-through-software-2350b3e77ce7
TODO
- Better lib design, currently its just a mess of functions and structs, need to refactor it into a more usable and
- intuitive API
- Add more examples, maybe a mini-game?
- Experimental UDP support, maybe using QUIC?
- Add tuned buffering and improve performance by lessen serialization and deserialization, where possible (Zero-copy, etc.)
- Fixed the DAMN BACKPRESSURE, CHANNEL GETS FULL AND THEN EVERYTHING BLOWS UP
- Somehow increase TCP write throughput, the only bottleneck right now is TCP write, which is fucking I/O bound!!
- Hooks for authoritative server, so that users can implement their own game logic and state management, and use this library for networking only
