Status: Unstable, under development.
There are many game engines that target browsers these days. To give just a few examples:
The support for multiplayer with a browser client offered by most established engines, ranges from "severely limited" to "non-existent". Relatedly, certain kinds of games — or game mechanics — are typically problematic or avoided entirely in a browser-based game, due to the Head-of-line blocking that comes with HTTP/WebSocket-based communication. It's likely that these engines have not been able to ship a networking solution for the browser that would be on par with other platforms that have access to unordered, unreliable networking layers.
Given the potential of WebRTC DataChannels to fulfill a similar role to UDP in traditional Game Engine architecture, and support for WebRTC being relatively widespread, I thought it would be interesting to explore whether WebRTC could improve this situation.
In this insightful article the game networking veteran Glenn Fiedler specifically criticises WebRTC as "extremely complex", stemming from its focus on peer-to-peer networking, and states that:
game developers appreciate simplicity and desire a "WebSockets for UDP"-like approach over the complexity of WebRTC
He goes on to propose a new UDP-based protocol netcode.io with a view to it perhaps being accepted in to browser implementations.
While I entirely agree with Glenn on WebRTC having a lot of baggage beyond what is required for an unreliable channel between a game client and server, I wish to examine whether its possible create a system on top of WebRTC, that hides enough of that complexity, and allows us to build and deploy browser games that can get the advantages of this unreliable data channel and works in browser implementations today, rather than introducing a new standard and waiting for another round of browser standardisation and implementation.
In order to prove that a game networking solution is effective for development and deployment, it is prudent to actually use it in a few example games that benefit from the networking solution. To support building these examples, I'm implementing a full runtime for organising game state and simulation, named Laniakea, in addition to the networking subsystem. Thus this codebase is a "game engine" rather than just a "game networking library".
Games shall implement their state and their logic in terms of this runtime, and as a result, will get out-of-the-box state replication between server and client. Games will be able to control networking where it intersects with things like "visibility" in a game, in order to achieve both security and performance objectives. Laniakea will provide a more "bring your own" approach to everything outside of State, Simulation, and Networking.
- Statically typed. Built with TypeScript.
- Game state replication over webRTC Data Channels. Avoids Head-of-line blocking.
Assuming you have node v10.15.3 and yarn v1.16.0 installed.
To see the demo:
yarn run bootstrap
yarn run build
# See it run
yarn run demo
While it's running open http://127.0.0.1:8080 to see the demo. Try opening 2 browser tabs!
Perhaps check out the demo n-player pong implementation, or check out the API docs.
This is a monorepo of multiple npm packages managed using lerna, and yarn's workspaces feature.
We'll assume you have node and yarn installed. I'm using node v14.16.0 and yarn 1.22.10 in case it matters.
yarn run prettier:write
yarn run lint:fix
yarn run typedoc
yarn run lerna exec --concurrency 1 "yarn upgrade --latest"
yarn upgrade --latest
# If the above doesn't seem to update everything, this might work better:
yarn upgrade-interactive --latest