Modern cloud for multiplayer games
blog.hathora.dev
blog.hathora.dev
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.
When we make it generally available, we will definitely make pricing front and center!
Simple - For semi-auto vertical scale only; turn based & single instance low tick-effort central servers (can provide less bill shock for bursts for same set up effort as rolling your own)
Complex - For large horizontal scale of high-tick effort games with full session pinned websockets by geo
both can easily be billed in the wholesale standard RAM GB-hours (say 1.5x cost) as you will be moved up or fanned out to beefier or more systems right when ticks are not being completed well enough within the desired tickrate.
I expect they'll suggest a max of 10,000 players and 100 rooms @ 50ms ticks taking avg. 5ms tick compute on the smallest VM (~50% util which on a 512MB 1x-shared-CPU costs $3.24 p.m on fly)
It's a 2d multiplayer platformer using Phaser[0] for physics on the backend, and it's hosted on Hathora Cloud!
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...
1) Built in authentication/identity
2) Session/room based connections (with lobbies, matchmaking, etc)
3) Handlers for various transports (websocket, TCP, UDP)
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?
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)
I think the docs link is a great intro: https://docs.hathora.dev
Happy to answer any questions :)
- 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.
Does Hathora have any customers? It says "scale to millions." Has anyone ever used Hathora to scale to millions of something?
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.
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!
I didn't get a good grasp, however, of how it compares to something like Photon: https://www.photonengine.com/
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?
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
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?
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...
> 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.
Your middle paragraph is works fine for LAN, and is how games were programmed. send controller input over the network, compute the next state, send controller input over the network, repeat. But, things get complicated as network delay goes up.
Imagine you put two consoles next to each other with a 150ms delay Ethernet cable between them.
If you always have to wait for your opponent's inputs, a 150ms delay makes the maximum tick rate drops to less than 7 ticks per second.
You can't just start the game at the same time, with the same seed and apply inputs as soon as they arrive. The games would instantly desync, because your inputs from frame 1 apply on frame 15 for your opponent, and your opponent's inputs from frame 1 don't get to you until your frame 15.
ok so just update the engine so that local inputs are processed 15 frames later. that works, but it makes players nauseous. and what if there is a lag spike?
Modern netcode can gracefully deal with network delay, lag spikes, dropped packets, faulty client hardware, and more, while being computationally and network efficient, and can't be exploited for an unfair advantage. A proper explanation of rollback code involves special relativity and time travel. It's so cool. I'm working on my own article and I'll try to send it to you when I'm done.
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
In real-time multiplayer games, we often need to worry about dynamic latency adjustment, prediction and rollback. Are any of these built-in?
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.
the money people coming telling game devs how to make their servers to become inefficient
little do they know