Hey folks, so I've been hammering away at the netcode on the rewrite, and one experimental feature I'm excited about is the UDP hole punching.
In short, hole punching will allow some, but not all players to be able to host servers without portforwarding. I'll say again, some but not all. Most players who play straight from home with a typical residential connection will be able to host without portforwarding, but if you play from a school, work, coffee shop, etc basically anywhere with public internet or where a lot of people will be using it at once, you will probably still need to portforward.
This is because there is heightened security across your local network due to so many strangers using it at once. This all might sound familiar to those who have ever had problems with services such as Xbox Live, which heavily depend on your network's NAT configuration to work correctly.
With a strict NAT, not only will you be unable to host but you may be unable to join some open NAT servers as well, unless they port forward. So even with an open NAT, its probably still a good idea to port forward your server so that all players would be able to join it.
If you're an aspiring networking nerd, you can read a more in-depth explanation on how it works here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching
Anyhow, I need to get a good idea of how many of you will see the benefits of this new feature just to see if it's something that will have an impact on the server hosting aspect of community. And I'm gonna need your help.
First, you will need to download this small tool I made. It will determine if your network is an open or strict NAT, and record your IP address on my server so I can get an idea of how many of you have open or strict NATs. This will be pretty helpful for me. You can download it below.
The NAT Survey is over. Thanks for your help!
And in case you think this tool is gonna hack your computer or something, I have also made the source code available for this tool. It's packed into a GMZ file, which can be opened with Game Maker Studio (1.4 specifically cause I made this on my laptop but it should work in GMS2 too)
The NAT Survey is over. Thanks for your help!
Once you have the EXE downloaded, run it and you should see a small black window. Press 1 to send your NAT Type to my server and it will be recorded. Once it says "Thank you" then you're done and can close and delete the program. If you can't connect, then you may need to allow the tool past any firewalls you have.
Yes, it can be unnerving to see a strict NAT type, but I will still be hosting my own servers for this case, and hopefully you'll still be able to connect to some other servers that haven't bothered to port forward. There is no real way to "fix" a strict NAT type, unless you have it in good with your local network administrator who could configure your internet to an open NAT. Maybe bake them cookies or something?
The more people that do this, the better idea I'll have as to how many people can host a game and I can adjust the rewrite's course accordingly. There are an infinite amount of different network configurations, and while it's impossible to write the game to make it all work perfectly, I'm exhausting every source of information I have to make server hosting easy for as many people as possible.
That's it. Thanks for your support!
- S
FYI regarding the last post I'm probably not gonna let you pre-order the second DLC, stupid idea. I will probably put up the first beta soon, available to anyone who already owns Premium, but I'm not sure when yet.