Show HN: Ballparq – a small PaaS for Godot games | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ballparq – a small PaaS for Godot games

ballparq.games

71 pointsoap_bram20 comments

Really interested in the multiplayer functionality, since Unity seems to have made zero progress on the problem in the last 5 years.

Do you know where I could read more about the problems with Unity multiplayer? My brother is investing a lot of time into building a game with Unity and he fully intends it to be multiplayer. I need to warn him if there's something horrible there.

The creator of Garry's Mod and Rust had a relevant blog post on this recently. There's a section specific to the multiplayer issues.

https://garry.tv/unity-2020

Thanks, this is helpful. I'll pass it on.

No problem. Unreal Engine changed their license in January so that they don't take any money until a million dollars so it's definitely worth considering.

It sounds to me like they are sacrificing backwards compatibility. If you have an existing customer base this is one of the worst decisions you can make. When you release incompatible products you split your customer base along these products and if your newer product isn't sufficiently convincing then instead of gaining customers you will lose your existing ones.

Yeah I don't know the whole story but my understanding is that they originally made Unity work pretty well for mobile and 2d single player games so their 3d rendering and multiplayer support sucked. Now they're branching into the AA and AAA realm and they had to forego compatibility with their earlier rendering pipeline and multiplayer library in order to make it work for those use cases.

It works really well actually, in the backend I compile a server version of a game, which exposes Godot's High Level Multiplayer API. On the other end you just need to connect to that server and it works! Most of the heavy lifting and the conceptual part is actually native Godot!

This is awesome, and could actually be a really cool competitor to itch.io if you play it right.

Thanks! Another guy made a good point about a listing as well, I'll look into that!

Looks cool, but the market around godot is rather very small now and all the games made on Godot tend to very small, hobby-ish, not very monetization ready, thus make your potential customers are a very minority.

Of course someone may want to show case his games and host them on the platform, all in all a cool project and hope one day it takes off!

True, it's mostly a passion project as well. I've worked with Godot so much and thought this was a missing feature for most non-developer hobbyist that want to make games. My plan was maybe to sponsor some game-jams to get more known.

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm interested. When I click "Submit" to sign up for the beta, my browser gets a 500 error submitting a post request.

Oh shucks, I'll look into that, thanks!

Looks really interesting! Tried to sign up for the beta, but the form didn't submit.

Fixing it right now, gonna add a quick alert when the data submitted!

Thanks for letting me know!

not a game developer, but big-up for the launch. great product. & yeah, the browser distribution mechanism is neat. my advice, have a listing portal - where published games are listed

Good idea! Thanks for the kind words!

> Use the high-level Godot Multiplayer API in combination with Websockets and ballparq automatically sets up a multiplayer server in seconds!

I doubt this works very well.

Well, it's still in beta so how would you know?

Also, Websockets are a pretty good time saver. They are basically a thin layer on top of TCP that allows you to send packets of arbitrary size whereas TCP only allows you to send a single stream of bytes and you have to do everything yourself.

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