nengi instance transfers are doneee
Oh and there’s a hook for player authentication as well. It is up to the dev how/if they want to authenticate though. I need another day to clean/up test before release.
There is no formal TLS / SSH / WSS support, but it is easily added if desired.
It came out pretty interesting in the end. An instance can transfer a player to another address and transfer some data along with the player. The instances actually speak to each other before the player gets transferred. The instances do this via the same websockets that the players use, they just identify themselves with a password. The source instance generates a transferRequest, and the target instance responds with a transferResponse (or fails under a variety of circumstances). If the transfer is accepted, then the source instance sends a transfer message to the client which goes ahead and connects to the target instance, bearing a code that identifies the client. The target instance recognizes the client upon arrival, and gains access to the data that was initially transferred from the other server. Thus nothing from the client is ever trusted -- its the servers who have a conversation with each other, and they merely give the client a receipt (a reference to the conversation) which does not divulge any details to the client. This follows the security model in nengi of making the servers the authority on the game state.
Transfers are pretty quick, taking slightly longer than the round-trip latency between the machines. Transfers are asynchronous.
This enables some really basic but scalable functionality -- such as having a entrance to a dungeon, building, city, portal, etc. where the end point may reside on another server... be that another physical machine or just another instance running in another thread on the same machine. It also offers a way to secure instances, because the game logic can define and enforce rules about who can enter which instance. Lots of features rely on controlling player access (pvp arenas, party-based instances, games that require membership, etc.)
I’d like to keep adding to this demo over time... perhaps it can become a full-featured nengi example eventually. For now the demo just shows a Tiled Map Editor map, an animated character, and inter-instance travel which involves the game client resetting itself and loading up a new map. It hits a lot of the features which were requested, but isn’t much of a game...all you can do is walk around.
