Go, Go, Godot!
  • 0

Creating a UDP peer-to-peer connection

November 16, 2023

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.

Here’s an older example of a signaling server: https://github.com/Faless/gd-webrtc-signalling/tree/master

gdscriptgodotnetworking
Posted in Godot.
Share
Previousgodot-matcha: Free multiplayer without a server
NextSuper Godot Galaxy Concept

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

  • January 27, 2023

    Dynamically finding and loading resources from the Filesystem for Android and Web Exports

    A little while ago, I created a type of AudioManager to make it easier to work with sound files in bulk: Rather than assigning audio streams by hand, I was doing it programmatically; reading the contents of a directory and using load() to get the resources. It worked great and saved a lot of time …

  • September 29, 2022

    Audio Manager to handle the loading of sound effects in bulk

    Years ago I purchased a game dev bundle on HumbleBundle. Part of that was a sound library called Pro Sound Collection. It’s pretty comprehensive, whether RPG or FPS, there are sounds for a ton of use cases. I might as well use them for something. Luckily for me, the sound collection is pretty well organized. …

  • December 22, 2022

    A GDScript refactoring exercise

    Arguably, more fun than writing code is removing code. I was assembling a split-screen multiplayer UI. The goal behavior is to show/hide the appropriate displays for the players, depending on how many players there are. Initially, the code to update the UI was very simple, because I started with two players. In that case, you …

  • March 12, 2025

    Inventory System 2 Alpha 3 available

    This release improves weight management. Inventories can now configure an option weight limit, and item stacking and item transfer strategies are weight-aware. The crafting demo and crafting mechanic in the inventory tour have been improved. Auto-crafting is limited to the crafting slide, so that items don’t automatically and unexpectedly get crafted while stepping through the …

    © 2026 GoGoGodot.io. All rights reserved.