[zemo]

have you ever actually done this?

I don't mean to sound smug, but I'm the author of the Jackbox Games multiplayer servers, I regularly handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous websocket connections from players' phones. I can't for the life of me find a server implementation of webrtc data channels that I would actually put into production. I've seen a few blog posts with toy examples, but nothing that is ready for production. It sounds nice in theory, but try actually finding a production-ready server implementation of WebRTC data channels. I would LOVE to find a documented example of doing client-server communication with WebRTC data channels (a Go implementation on the server specifically). I've found no such thing. Every few months I search and don't find such a thing, and I don't need the extra few ms of latency improvement badly enough that it would be worth the engineering time to author it myself. If you know of one that's actually ready for primetime, I'd love to hear about it.

edit: after writing this comment, I did some snooping around since I haven't snooped around on this topic in a few months, this looks promising, unclear how widely used people are using it for production work: https://github.com/pion/webrtc

[vvanders]

Had to write the SDP handshake and re-build a subset of SCTP from scratch since the only SCTP implementation uses a global listener which doesn't play nice for a clean server implementation(it was also a royal pain to compile in a way that played nice with Rust).

I got it working far enough to handle the WebRTC handshake over SCTP and get some basic data flowing. It's still in pretty rough shape and ran out of time to document it to any degree where someone else could take it and run with it.

If there's enough interest I might pick it up again but right now I've got other priorities going on.

[bentcorner]

Just wanted to comment and say thank you for your work :). The Jackbox games work flawlessly and even when they get into a weird state a refresh usually sorts things out. Thanks for covering whatever weird corner cases you had to cover to get it to work so consistently.

I'm actually a little surprised the Jackbox games aren't monetized differently. They cost so little up front and that CPU time can't be free.

Just today I set up my wife's laptop with Drawful 2 and Jackbox 6 so she can play with her coworkers tomorrow. Thanks!

[geocar]

> have you ever actually done this?

I have, but I didn't use go. I wrote a webrtc server in C, and probably handled something north of a trillion event points per month this way (receiving telemetry from interactive digital advertisements).

My goal wasn't latency but capacity: I can handle maybe 100kqps in HTTP on the same kit that could handle something like 600kqps+ messages with this (Never did proper limit testing here, since I knew my supplier was limited on the network links). It took about three weeks to get operational to a point it could be added to production, which was worth it to me.

[zemo]

when you say http do you mean a roundtrip per data point? curious if you went from 1 http request per data point to webrtc or from something more like 1 websocket message per data point to webrtc.

[geocar]

The former. Events might come minutes apart, and session establishment costs peanuts compared to having a TCP port open for minutes.

[J_tt]

One thing I've always been curious about with JackBox is if it does anything when everyone's on the same LAN?

[zemo]

not sure what you have in mind, but no not currently

[blackflame7000]

What about household vs household games? Bring a new meaning to keeping up with the Jones’s :)