Sunlight

Last week I discussed the core network structures for games . There is one really important topic that I left out then: relay servers . Relay servers are especially important to understand since I have recently heard them confused with dedicated servers quite often. Today I would like to explain what relay servers are, and what they are not. A relay server is essentially just a computer that sends and receives packets. It does not really process data and does not do any gameplay logic. All it does is that if player A sends a packet to player B, then instead of sending it directly player A sends it to the relay server. The relay server then sends it to player B. The relay server is essentially just a glorified router. So why is this useful? Relay servers have two big advantages. The first is that players can practically always connect to them. Security measures in routers are a big problem in internet connections, causing many users to not be able to connect to each other directly. Usua...

When starting to develop an online multiplayer game you need to choose how to structure the netcode. Especially important is the question which computer decides on what part of the gameplay. There are roughly four models in common use in games these days. Today I would like to explain which those are and what their benefits and downsides are. Here are those four basic structures (of course all kinds of hybrids and variants are possible): Client-server In the two versions of client-server there is one computer who is alone responsible for the entire game simulation: the server. The clients cannot make real gameplay decisions. This means that if a player presses a button, it goes to the server, the server executes it and then sends back the results to the client. This adds significant lag to all input, which is of course totally unacceptable and kills the gameplay feel. To make a game playable with this model all kinds of tricks are needed. The best trick I am aware of is described in th...

When learning about online multiplayer programming I always read that it is important to keep the bandwidth usage low. There are tons of articles that discuss bandwidth optimisations and limitations. However, while developing Awesomenauts we learned that packet count can in some cases be equally important. Somehow I have rarely seen this mentioned in articles or books, so I figured it was about time to write a blogpost to tell the world: packet count is also important! When we started development of Awesomenauts I though that packet count was only relevant because of the size of the packet headers. Every UDP packet has a UDP header (8 bytes) and an IP header (at least 20 bytes). This means that no matter how little data you send per packet, it always gets an added 28 bytes. This makes packet count relevent for bandwidth: if you send 200 packets per second, then you are sending 5600 bytes per second only in headers. I thought this is where the importance of packet count ends. If I can ...