WebSockets and WebRTC

At the beginning of the year, I played a little bit with WebSockets and Rust. I tried to create a backend for a browser game implemented with Three.js.

However, things did not work very well. A friend and I did some tests, but his connection was underperforming, which is actually an advantage for testing. Its delays were very high, packets kept accumulating and being applied all at once. Moreover, I had implemented everything with unbounded queues. Therefore, the server program running on my PC occupied several GB of RAM at a certain point. Good thing we found all these problems soon.

The first suggestion you find when you start programming multiplayer games is that you should use UDP if you can. So, I finally decided to try WebRTC.

I soon discovered that WebSocket and WebRTC are completely different. The former is a protocol for full-duplex communication, usually between a browser and a webserver. The latter is a series of APIs for real-time communications, and spans from media capture, streams, screen sharing to data channels, which is the capability I was interested in. … [Leggi il resto]