WebRTC, TLS hardening and Scalable game servers

This year is proving to be yet another busy one for us. We’ve continued to work with Eonic Gaming on their servers for the Turf Battles Triumphus 3D MMORPG and we have done quite a bit of work with various clients regarding hardening their TLS servers. The main focus though has been digging into WebRTC data channels.

The WebRTC work is nice, though fairly complex. It’s based on lots of RFCs and the initial learning curve was pretty steep. WebRTC data channels, in themselves, are pretty simple, but they’re built on a huge stack of other technologies: SCTP, DTLS, ICE, STUN, etc. Getting all of that working to the point where we get a simple “hello world” message from browser into the server and back has taken some time. There’s lots of open source stuff out there but much of it needs a lot of work to understand fully as documentation, comments and naming often leaves a lot to be desired.

We’re looking at producing a highly scalable implementation of WebRTC data channels from the ground up for a client who wants to add this kind of connectivity to their application servers; WebRTC is often used for peer to peer connections where both peers are browsers, our system has the server as one of the peers. Right now we’re doing a custom implementation specifically for this client but eventually we expect to produce an Option Pack with a slightly more general purpose WebRTC implementation.

As always we’ve also been working on several new releases of The Server Framework, a 6.8.1 maintenance release and continuing work on what could become massively modernised 7.0 release.