
Show HN: Ballparq – a small PaaS for Godot games - oap_bram
https://ballparq.games
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quxpar
Really interested in the multiplayer functionality, since Unity seems to have
made zero progress on the problem in the last 5 years.

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freedomben
Do you know where I could read more about the problems with Unity multiplayer?
My brother is investing a lot of time into building a game with Unity and he
fully intends it to be multiplayer. I need to warn him if there's something
horrible there.

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ShamelessC
The creator of Garry's Mod and Rust had a relevant blog post on this recently.
There's a section specific to the multiplayer issues.

[https://garry.tv/unity-2020](https://garry.tv/unity-2020)

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imtringued
It sounds to me like they are sacrificing backwards compatibility. If you have
an existing customer base this is one of the worst decisions you can make.
When you release incompatible products you split your customer base along
these products and if your newer product isn't sufficiently convincing then
instead of gaining customers you will lose your existing ones.

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ShamelessC
Yeah I don't know the whole story but my understanding is that they originally
made Unity work pretty well for mobile and 2d single player games so their 3d
rendering and multiplayer support sucked. Now they're branching into the AA
and AAA realm and they had to forego compatibility with their earlier
rendering pipeline and multiplayer library in order to make it work for those
use cases.

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Gollapalli
This is awesome, and could actually be a really cool competitor to itch.io if
you play it right.

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oap_bram
Thanks! Another guy made a good point about a listing as well, I'll look into
that!

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terrycody
Looks cool, but the market around godot is rather very small now and all the
games made on Godot tend to very small, hobby-ish, not very monetization
ready, thus make your potential customers are a very minority.

Of course someone may want to show case his games and host them on the
platform, all in all a cool project and hope one day it takes off!

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oap_bram
True, it's mostly a passion project as well. I've worked with Godot so much
and thought this was a missing feature for most non-developer hobbyist that
want to make games. My plan was maybe to sponsor some game-jams to get more
known.

Thanks for the kind words.

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TYPE_FASTER
I'm interested. When I click "Submit" to sign up for the beta, my browser gets
a 500 error submitting a post request.

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oap_bram
Oh shucks, I'll look into that, thanks!

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wastedhours
Looks really interesting! Tried to sign up for the beta, but the form didn't
submit.

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oap_bram
Fixing it right now, gonna add a quick alert when the data submitted!

Thanks for letting me know!

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dzonga
not a game developer, but big-up for the launch. great product. & yeah, the
browser distribution mechanism is neat. my advice, have a listing portal -
where published games are listed

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oap_bram
Good idea! Thanks for the kind words!

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nightowl_games
> Use the high-level Godot Multiplayer API in combination with Websockets and
> ballparq automatically sets up a multiplayer server in seconds!

I doubt this works very well.

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imtringued
Well, it's still in beta so how would you know?

Also, Websockets are a pretty good time saver. They are basically a thin layer
on top of TCP that allows you to send packets of arbitrary size whereas TCP
only allows you to send a single stream of bytes and you have to do everything
yourself.

