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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

It’s unfortunate that for browser based multiplayer gaming it’s not feasible to use something like WebRTC and we must stick to TCP based connections.

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I am pretty darn sure it is feasible:

https://github.com/nathhB/nbnet

In fact, I am on the hunt for a minimal C library to do exactly this for a hobby project and nbnet is the best candidate I have found so far. The only drawback so far is that I would love to have voice support and nbnet (rightfully so to keep it simple) does not provide it and I would have to roll it on my own.

Really? WebRTC DataChannels seem like they could fulfill your needs. What is it that prevents using something like WebRTC Data Channels and forces you to use TCP based connections?

Agreed. I was using webrtc data channels for a messaging app and it’s great - the data sent could simply be multiplayer co-ord’s, actions etc instead.

Oh, you’re right!

So when I looked into it last month - its true DataChannels would be the answer. But I couldn't find any "nice" abstraction in the language i'm using for it. like I just can't get some standalone WebRTCDataChannels abstraction - many WebRTC libraries don't have implementation for this or its all very specialized for audio transfer. There is a route of using some standalone WebRTC gateway service that your application can send messages to (I think this is the purpose of Janus?) - blah blah point is: its not easily done. Not in Elixir so far anyways.

And the second part of it is - I'm sure its easily done but at this point there is some incentive to keep whatever implementation you have to yourself.

Or maybe I missed something and I should try looking into it again.

There is an Elixir version of WebRTC available. It is still early days, but your feedback/asks would be monumental in making it better!

https://github.com/elixir-webrtc

It is a minefield you’re right. I just implemented my own version of it with trial and error.

Agreed. I really looked into if WebRTC would be possible for the game I'm trying to make but currently its not as easy as people make it out to be. fortunately - the communication channel is easily abstracted, so I wait for the day i finally get the abstraction i want.

There's also WebTransport

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