Can we make a multiplayer game without a remote server?

[Nodragem]

Hello,

I started to use socket.io, express and phaser to make multiplayer games.

I followed this tutorial: https://phaser.io/news/2017/03/socketio-multiplayer-tutorial

and I used Heroku to host and serve my game.

 

However, I was thinking that, in the case I want to make a coop game, I would not need the server to be always running on Heroku.

Instead, I could use one of the client machine as the server? Do you think that this is possible?

Thanks,

Nodregam

[Jimaginary]

It may be "possible", but having an authoritative client can open you up to backing, cheating, etc. It's a much better idea IMO to have an actual server. 

[JackFalcon]

something came up on the radar yesterday.

https://webrtchacks.com/datachannel-multiplayer-game/

They say, aok with WebRTC.

"The DataChannel is fully peer-to-peer and encrypted"

https://github.com/agilityfeat/memory-webrtc-data-channel.git

I plan to try ....

... anyone know of a success with this or something similar?

[shen]

I just studied this a little bit. https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc is a good start (Although WebRTC is P2P, it's still better to have a signalling server than manual hand-shaking). 

[Nodragem]

On 1/20/2018 at 10:49 PM, Jimaginary said:

It may be "possible", but having an authoritative client can open you up to backing, cheating, etc. It's a much better idea IMO to have an actual server. 

yep, but for instance, for a local coop session with 2 players, players may not want to be connected to internet. Hence the local machine would need to run the server and 2 clients.

Basically, I would like my game to run local coop sessions (server+2 clients on the local machine) or remote coop sessions (remote server, and 1 client by machine).

Another instance would be the Nintendo Switch, where you can play locally with two machines, hence one machine needs to be server+client.

I think that the first case (server+2 clients on local machine) is doable with socket.io, running the server on localhost. However, I am unsure how it would work with the Nintendo Switch case.

On 1/21/2018 at 1:18 AM, JackFalcon said:

something came up on the radar yesterday.

https://webrtchacks.com/datachannel-multiplayer-game/

They say, aok with WebRTC.

"The DataChannel is fully peer-to-peer and encrypted"

https://github.com/agilityfeat/memory-webrtc-data-channel.git

I plan to try ....

... anyone know of a success with this or something similar?

That sounds good; I guess we can still make one of the machines the "server".