Do you need dedicated servers for Netplay?

RetroArch General
#1
  • Yes
  • Maybe
  • No

0 voters

Opening this poll to figure out whether the effort is worthy of my time or not.

The concept is to have a separate refresh button for dedicated servers; sending a request for a server to load your running core + content (requests can be denied by the server and the server must have both the core and the content pre-stored locally).

Servers could build RetroArch with as little features as possible and run it on null drivers to just execute the core logic on their end.

Please share this poll around if you can, and if you are voting, post your opinions below if possible.

#2

I take it this would allow both players to (optimally) split the difference on latency instead of having the full round-trip latency from one to the other and back?

#3

Well, it would function like any other type of dedicated server, so what you said and reduced bandwidth. On a p2p connection, the client acting as the server needs to send packets to all connected clients.

Running dedicated servers is already possible by running netplay with the host instance joining in as a spectator; the problem with this approach is that the remote client can’t control which content is running; at least not without 3rd party software running at the server side.

Internal support requires additions to the lobby server (to list dedicated servers) and I really don’t want to mess with Goolag shit (Google VMs and code written in Go), so I am only bothering with this if it receives enough support from the community.

#4

I think our Brazillian friends would be very interested in it. they regularly request their own relay servers, etc. and AFAIK they are the single largest bloc of netplay users.

When I get back to discord, I can try to google-translate something for the portuguese channel.

#5

LR wouldn’t be running any dedicated servers to avoid copyright and extra costs though, and they can already run their own relay servers (https://github.com/libretro/netplay-tunnel-server).

1 Like
#6

Looks like there is no interest. Poll has been running for two weeks and not even a single vote.

The dedicated server implementation is not trivial due to the reasons already discussed in this thread, so I’ll not be pursuing this any further.

1 Like
#7

hello, i’m from brazil, i program in c# and venturing into other languages, linux, if you need to exchange ideas my email [email protected]