Creating network connections with Godot is simple — as long as you have the other party’s IP address, and there’s no NAT gateway involved. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem in most cases. You don’t know the other party’s IP, and these days, just about everyone is behind a combination wifi router/gateway/firewall with NAT.
Conceptually, NAT hole-punching is pretty simple, and this video explains how it’s done with just netcat.
In a nutshell:
listen on a particular port (e.g. 50001)
nc -u -l 50001
echo ‘hello’ | nc -u ipaddr 50001
echo ‘hole punch’ | nc -u -p 50001 ipaddr 50002
third party exchanges ip addresses
Putting it all together, player A (hosting a game) would require the game to connect to the directory server.
The directory server would list the game as something a player can now connect to.
player B (client who wants to join) will tell the directory service that it wants to connect, and will send its info
The directory server forwards the information to player A (host), player A will then send a packet to player B, and respond to the directory server
The directory server will then tell player B to go ahead and connect to player A.
Player B should be able to punch through to player A
With Godot, the connections from client to host would use ENetMultiplayerPeer.create_client(), which can specify the local port.
We’re excited about this release, which includes a range of quality-of-life additions and refinements. Drag-and-drop support has been improved with a second strategy: Click-and-release: Simply clicking (and releasing) an item will pick it up. This leverages Godot’s force-drag functionality and approximates the drag-and-drop behavior that games like Valheim and Palworld use in their inventory items. …
Version 1.0 of the Inventory System is now available. It includes a few new additions since the closed beta: Lots of fixes found their way into this release as well:
Here’s a collection of tutorials that are helpful if you’re new to using Control and Container nodes to create UIs in Godot 4. The Game Dev Artisan video covers creating a simple UI with a reload indicator for a simple 2D tank game: Clear Code’s 11+ hour Ultimate Introduction to Godot 4 has a chapter …
Creating a UDP peer-to-peer connection
Creating network connections with Godot is simple — as long as you have the other party’s IP address, and there’s no NAT gateway involved. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem in most cases. You don’t know the other party’s IP, and these days, just about everyone is behind a combination wifi router/gateway/firewall with NAT.
Conceptually, NAT hole-punching is pretty simple, and this video explains how it’s done with just netcat.
In a nutshell:
Putting it all together, player A (hosting a game) would require the game to connect to the directory server.
With Godot, the connections from client to host would use ENetMultiplayerPeer.create_client(), which can specify the local port.
Here’s an older example of a signaling server: https://github.com/Faless/gd-webrtc-signalling/tree/master
Related Posts
Inventory System v1.10 available
We’re excited about this release, which includes a range of quality-of-life additions and refinements. Drag-and-drop support has been improved with a second strategy: Click-and-release: Simply clicking (and releasing) an item will pick it up. This leverages Godot’s force-drag functionality and approximates the drag-and-drop behavior that games like Valheim and Palworld use in their inventory items. …
Inventory System v1.4.1 available
This small update addresses inventory serialization to persist the allow_gaps and expiration_multiplier settings. These were previously overlooked.
Inventory System v1.0 available
Version 1.0 of the Inventory System is now available. It includes a few new additions since the closed beta: Lots of fixes found their way into this release as well:
Building UIs in Godot 4
Here’s a collection of tutorials that are helpful if you’re new to using Control and Container nodes to create UIs in Godot 4. The Game Dev Artisan video covers creating a simple UI with a reload indicator for a simple 2D tank game: Clear Code’s 11+ hour Ultimate Introduction to Godot 4 has a chapter …