For anyone who's ever been frustrated, confused, or intimidated by networking in #VRChat world development, I would highly recommend taking some time to get a nice cup of your favorite hot beverage, get yourself comfy, and give this video a chance to shape your understanding of networking. - ThreadSky

phasedragon.bsky.social • 29 days ago

For anyone who's ever been frustrated, confused, or intimidated by networking in #VRChat world development, I would highly recommend taking some time to get a nice cup of your favorite hot beverage, get yourself comfy, and give this video a chance to shape your understanding of networking.

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phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

Oh and if you think this is another "RPC bad" talk and you feel personally attacked, feel free to skip to here for some vindication:

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

The end of this talk demonstrates exactly why network events with parameters would be cool, as they would open up more of those excellent use cases. Spicy take: But part of the reason that's been shelved for so long in VRChat is because of the first half of this video.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

But still, I recognize that refusing to give people a tool because you're worried about them using it as a footgun does not prevent them from finding other footguns. Nor does it foster good relations with people who know how to use the tool properly.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

So with that in mind, I want to apologize for some of the things I've said over the years that come too close to "protecting the ideological purity of networking". That's not helpful, and in some cases, it may have even contributed to the burnout of people who mean a great deal to me. I'm sorry.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

If you've ever felt pushed away by that, hit me up. Let's chat.

waffleslapper.poetica.dev•29 days ago

Most of the reason why I hate VRC networking is because I was spoiled on, of all things, Garry's Mod Lua and it's networking library. There I can just construct my own damn packets. It's had that capability for more than 15 years now, and sending function signatures over the net feels... suboptimal.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

I think one of the biggest things preventing that is the lack of server-side udon. If you had that and raw packet networking, you'd have the ability to make your own networking stack. But raw packets in an environment where you can't tell the server what to do results in very non-scalable solutions

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

For example, the most common example of this is that VRC handles late joiners by caching the latest state and sending it to just them when they join. This saves a lot of bandwidth ($$$), but it's not something you'd be able to do with raw packet access unless you also had server udon

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

As a result, the business incentive to expose raw packets is in the negatives, because of the risk of creators doing effectively the same thing but with a more expensive method.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

Part of the reason for these structures and abstractions in UGC is because it allows you to create your own client code which will follow rules that are understood and also followed by the server, which you don't have access to

waffleslapper.poetica.dev•29 days ago

In GLua, networking packet reception requires a registered listener, and packets are just sent as binary lumps. It is up to the coder to make sure things are being read in the right order.

waffleslapper.poetica.dev•29 days ago

It really is funny to me how much power a 20-year-old sandbox mod gives its coders, compared to a much newer platform purpose-built for creativity and socialization. This library even lets me set the bit-depth of the ints being sent!

https://wiki.facepunch.com/gmod/Net_Library_Usage

waffleslapper.poetica.dev•29 days ago

But most of all, it INCLUDES A CALLBACK TO LET ME KNOW WHICH CLIENT SENT THE NET MESSAGE, the lack of which is something that infuriated me about VRC networking.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

Safe to say this is my new favorite gameplay networking talk. I've tried making a video like this myself but it's tricky to decide what level of detail to go into. I think this one did an extraordinary job of showing just enough of each part to show the whole picture in a tight hour.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

This is not a deep technical talk! It's a mindset, a mental model for how to write code from the ground up that is designed to work well in networking.

Even if you're not a programmer, this video can help you understand what considerations must be made to develop a multiplayer game.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

If anything, you can completely ignore the (very small amount of) code in this talk, because it's not even about VRChat. But these concepts are pretty industry standard and universal, so it's not hard to find the parallels from this talk into VRChat.

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

But for those who are looking to dive deeper and don't already recognize those patterns, here's a translation:
- RPC = SendCustomNetworkEvent
- Network Dormancy = ObjectSync does this when it's not being touched
- Network Relevancy = Objectsync and players do this when they're far away from you

phasedragon.bsky.social•29 days ago

- State Notification = OnDeserialization and OnVariableChanged
- ForceNetUpdate = RequestSerialization (kinda?)

lucyluuu.me•29 days ago

looks really interesting, i’ll watch it tomorrow! thank you for sharing this :D

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