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darzu | 7 months ago

Does anyone know if this tech (or Iroh) is suitable for real-time networking for games? Basically, once connection is established, what's the overhead on top of UDP in terms of latency and bandwidth?

Edit: after digging a little, Iroh uses QUIC which looks like a reliable, ordered protocol as opposed to the unreliable, unordered nature of UDP which is what many games need.

Now what I'd love to figure out is if there's a way to use their relay hopping and connection management but send/receive data through a dumb UDP pipe.

discuss

order

CGamesPlay|7 months ago

> QUIC which looks like a reliable, ordered protocol as opposed to the unreliable, unordered nature of UDP which is what many games need.

This isn't right, as a sibling comment mentions. QUIC is a UDP-based protocol that handles stream multiplexing and encryption, but you can send individual, unordered, unreliable datagrams over the QUIC connection, which effectively boils down to UDP with a bit of overhead for the QUIC header. The relevant method in Iroh is send_datagram: https://docs.rs/iroh-net/latest/iroh_net/endpoint/struct.Con...

zackmorris|7 months ago

It would be nice if dumbpipe revealed the local and remote IP and UDP port numbers via something like STDERR or a signal so that apps could send UDP datagrams on them with ordinary socket calls. I'm guessing that QUIC uses a unique header in its first few bytes, so the app could choose something different and not interfere with the reliable stream.

A better solution would be to expose the iroh send_datagram and read_datagram calls somehow. Maybe if dumbpipe accepted a datagram flag like -d, then a second connection to a peer could be opened. It would recognize that the peer has already been found and maybe reuse the iroh instance. Then the app could send over either stream when it needs to be reliable or best effort.

This missing datagram feature was the first thing I thought of too when I read the post, so it's disappointing that it doesn't discuss it. Mostly all proof of concept tools like this are MVP, so don't attempt to be feature-complete, which forces the user to either learn the entirety of the library just to use it, or fork it and build their own.

IMHO that's really disappointing and defeats the purpose of most software today, since developers are programmed to think that the "do one thing and do it well" unix philosophy is the only philosophy. It's a pet peeve of mine because nearly the entirety of the labor I'm forced to perform is about working around these artificial and unintentional limitations.

Ok I just looked at https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.sh

  if [ "$OS" = "Windows_NT" ]; then
      echo "Error: this installer only works on linux & macOS." 1>&2
      exit 1
  else
So it appears to be linux and macOS only, which is of little use for games. I'm shocked, just shocked that I'll have to write my own..