Online multiplayer question

[mrbotnft]

Hi!

First of all I just want to congratulate you all for this amazing work. This codebase is huge and I am learning a lot by hopping around the code and playing the game.

I saw that the online multiplayer is implemented in P2P where the user is the server itself. This can lead (if I am not mistaken) to security problems that users could exploit to fake the results of the fights. Do you guys think that could be possible to extract this logic to a dedicated server? And if so, How hard could it be?

Keep the good work! Thanks in advance!

[kidagine]

Hey, thanks for the kind words, glad to hear some people can be helped from all of this :).

As for security concerns, there's definitely security issues when running a strictly P2P. GGPO which is the network solution used works only with P2P, to secure it better you would need to abstract the network layer to instead maybe use Steam networking or EOS etc, that way your IP is hidden behind an ID and people connect to a proxy, though doing something like that isn't a priority yet, so I can't speak on specifics, but it would definitely not be really easy, also note doing that adds latency, so there's always a balance between latency and security.
Also note in this case every user is authoritative, if someone tries to cheat it will cause a desync, and if there's a desync detection you can stop the match(Currently don't have desync detection).

I'll leave this issue open and whenever we get back at this I will respond again with a more specific solution, take what was said with a grain of salt, definitely more research is needed on this aspect.

[solcandy]

Hello kidagine!

Your game is awesome but when I install in WebGL and try to play online it appears a message of "Unavailable on Web"
Is there any way to fix it? Thanks

[kidagine]

Hi! thanks for the feedback. Currently online doesn't work in WebGL because of GGPO being a C++ library and WebGL doesn't like the way that's handled so I disabled the online feature in WebGL so that it doesn't crash the game.
I want to make it work for WebGL at some point, but the priority now is to make the base online functional.

(Also this should have probably been in a separate issue but oh well)