this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
866 points (94.3% liked)
Gaming
2739 readers
232 users here now
!gaming is a community for gaming noobs through gaming aficionados. Unlike !games, we don’t take ourselves quite as serious. Shitposts and memes are welcome.
Our Rules:
1. Keep it civil.
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry.
I should not need to explain this one.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month.
Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You need some entry point into a peer-to-peer network in order to make connections with peers. This often takes the form of a central server. In theory you can do have it be a bit more decentralized and have an initial list of peers to try to connect to who can then communicate about other peers, but you still need this initial entry point which is a potential point of failure long term, and I don’t think any games actually do this?
So… Technically speaking, in order to reliably connect peers most games are going to rely on a central server, which does technically cost some money to run, though it should be much cheaper to host than a proper game server which will actually be running the game and physics and stuff server side. With older games like quake you could easily connect to a server even without the master server (though you wouldn’t be able to use the server browser) and it was not terribly difficult to replace the master server with an alternative one.