Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: MohandevirIs it TCP/IP, UDP or something I haven't heard of? Isn't UDP faster but prone to packet loss thus reducing the quality of the stream?

TCP includes the control mechanism to deal with packet loss (detection and resending). For UDP it is up to the application to decide whether to detect it and what to do if something is lost.

And still be faster than TCP? Or is it better to go with TCP, in that case?

I might imagine that in a game, (as etonbears points out, without buffering, everything happening in real time) by the time lost packets get re-sent they'd be irrelevant, so it would be better to just ignore them and leave a little fuzz in the picture than to, like, refuse to show the image until it's all complete. That might suggest this UDP thing. But I don't know anything about this, I'm just trying to do logic from too little data.

Yeap, TCP has way too much overhead for an application that requires very low latency (the way this stream works is very similar on how tv broadcasting works). Also, in the Google backbone for this service they may be using other less known optimization in order to reduce the latency (Jumbo frames!)

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Quoting: ShmerlWhich in the Stadia context brings the questinon, why did Google throw in the towel with their Google Fiber? They should have invested in it even more instead of abandoning, showing that services like Stadia could work when ISP is built the right way.

In the presentation, they stated that they will have backbone that directly connects the ISPs gateways to the Stadia servers (probably this will be the magic/requirement for the "low latency" experience). So, on that scenario there is no way at which an ISP can add the Stadia data usage to your data cap limitation.

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When I read this

They also had id Software, talk about how it didn't take long to bring the new Doom Eternal to Stadia...

I was expecting that this phrase ended with: "We just had to install wine/proton.".

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I remember Ashes of Singularity steam mod answer:

There is a lot of industry interest in Linux right now as a game platform. I am not at liberty to explain why but Vulkan is a real game changer.

And I think that now we have an idea of why he didn't have the liberty to explain why ;)

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Quoting: ShmerlThat's what developer claimed in my case when I asked about it. It doesn't need to be NAT traversal specifically. Any feature that's tied to Steam store, in the service that can be general purpose can cause such kind of problem.

Then the same goes for the GoG API. From my point of view, what they don't want to implement/support is a server infrastructure in order to create a server/clients lobby.

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Quoting: ShmerlYou can have multiplayer without backend altogether, just run one instance as a server. I suppose most don't like that due to matchmaking logic and scalability issues.

Still, not an impediment to support multiplayer outside of Steam. If they decide to only use Steam network API (or GoG network API or whatever proprietary library), it definitely isn't because of a feature such as NAT traversal. For me that's just a vague excuse.

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Quoting: ShmerlSure, developers decide, but if they do want NAT traversal, they can't use Steam one without being tied to Steam. At least now.

But they are not tied to Steam in order to provide multiplayer. This is optional and, as I said, you can have multiplayer support without NAT traversal in all the versions of your game without any extra work (the extra work is actually creating the abstraction layer in order to support Steam networking API).

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Quoting: ShmerlSounds like another lock-in. I've seen at least one developer saying they'll stop updating their game on itch.io, because they want to add multiplayer, and since it needs NAT traversal, they decided to rely on Steam's service for it. Which means they can't use it with versions released in other stores... (It's also a clear example how the lack of IPv6 is causing harm).

So I don't see this as a good thing at all. Proper network services should not be tied to stores and developers should be able to use them no matter where they release. I suppose those don't need to be free, but tying them to a specific store is simply wrong.

But it's the developer who decides to only use Steam tools (and in your example, it sounds like a lame excuse). I don't think that anyone can say that "NAT transversal" is a mandatory feature for your game as it's a very low-level requirement. I mean, you can easily implement your multiplayer client-server processes that can work with or without NAT transversal (of course, in the latter the users will have to deal with network configurations...)

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Quoting: flesk"Co-op with your wife" - She enjoyed Torchlight II, so hopefully. There's no female character option (yet) though.

When started reading, first thing that come to my mind was to gift it to my girlfriend... Are we that old?

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Quoting: AsuI wish STALKER would also release a proper linux client...
you can never have enough post-apocalyptic funsies on linux...

Remember playing the first one on Wine long time ago without any issue (probably the GoG version), you may want to give it a try.

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