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How to set up a decentralized game/chat server (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've been kicking around the idea of running a server for games and chat woth some of my friends, but worry about everyone getting cut off when there's a disruption.

I've started looking into kubernetes out of curiosity, and it seems like we could potentially set up a cluster with master nodes at 3+ locations to hose whatever game server or chat server that we want with 100% uptime, solving my concerns.

Am I misunderstanding the kubernetes documentation, and this is just a terrible idea? Or am I on the right track?

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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Chat server is easy: Matrix (actually multiple servers but same effect)

Game server is very hard. The game has to be made for it or you have to be very good at network application engineering to hack it in.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The game has to be made for it

    Just for clarity, do you mean the game has to be made for self-hosted servers, or do you mean it has to be made to handle self-hosted servers across a cluster?

    The former is already a thing with Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, etc. The latter... Yeah I'd have to do digging on that

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Actually I can provide a little more detail. Check out how Matrix handles event graph resolution/desync. It's why messages sometimes come in out of order. This is a fundamental problem with decentralization: authority breakdown. The homesever in Matrix is considered the authority for the clients, but within the Federation itself there is no true authoritative party or event history. If a server goes off federation for a while, a room will split, and once it re-federates it and other servers will have different event graphs, assuming something happened in those rooms in the meantime for both the defederated server and federated server(s).

    Basically: videogames assume that within a certain amount of latency the server's state is permanent and authoritative. Federation breakdowns even for 500ms can destroy a games running state.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thank you for the detailed explanation

    It sounds like my friends and I are better off just having 1 primary server running everything, and pushing backups to 1 or 2 other servers that can be spun up if/when things go wrong with the primary server.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    The game has to be made for distributed servers. The game software expects that everything the server says is authorative, including for rollback. Multiple servers introduces an extra source of latency and it's just so hard to deal with.

    I don't know too much about this.

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