What this means is that now you can play GOG games that previously required the (non-Linux native) GOG Galaxy client!
…for multiplayer.
And I’m not sure why these developers forgot how to add LAN and direct IP connections to their games, but it sure does muddy the experience of buying “DRM-free” games.
While I agree it can be painful to do anything multiplayer without dedicated network support in the game itself, it’s a nontrivial thing for devs to add. Expecting every dev studio to be network experts as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections is why Steam finally added a way for games to simulate couch co-op between remote players. I try to buy games on GOG as my first choice but there are definitely factors (including price) where I’ll consider Steam instead.
It’s a nontrivial thing to make a good product for your customers, but it should still be done. If only GOG had the market muscle to require this without shooting themselves in the foot, like when Apple pretty much universally made digital music purchases DRM-free.
EDIT: Wait, what does this mean?
as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections
What infrastructure? You need some port forwarding know-how, but other than that, you type in an address and go.
Doing things with a direct connection to friends is something no one does anymore. Port forwarding for a game? Yeah it’s fine for people who are technically minded like I’m sure anyone in the community is, but walking a friend through it on their router just to play with them is a nonstarter. No, the cloud connection is how this is handled now. I haven’t seen a game in a decade do it via a direct connection from player to player.
I’m not a game dev, so I am asking naively this: why is networking code for games not standardized?
It’s crazy to me that so many companies develop their own netcode instead of pooling resources to create a library once and for all for netcode.
It is a non-trivial thing to develop, so everyone would gain from having a framework and library ready to use that works well and can be implemented into any game.
In the end, the information exchange is done between the client and the server and the application layer can have any packets it needs.
There are just a ton of ways to skin that cat. You can do things like object replication, where the server is authoritative and sends updates states to every player, but even then, you might want to have something like aiming in a 3D game done locally so that it feels responsive and then update it with the server’s understanding of what’s possible just in case things get out of whack. In the fighting game space, there’s rollback, where each player has a complete up to date simulation of what the game is doing, and they only send inputs back and forth; then if something is out of date, it resimulates the last couple of frames, invisibly, until it’s done catching up, all within the span of 1 frame. However, this approach tends to be less graceful when it comes to people coming and going, because you need to synchronize the game state before you start sharing information back and forth. The network infrastructure for something like Dark Souls, where you’re dynamically pulling in players, messages, and recordings of players’ ghosts, will be different still. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but the most common ones do tend to be available in one-size-fits-most.
There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.
What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.
Nice. I may be at long last able to play some of the games that crashes when trying to trigger a Gog Galaxy achievement. 😆
Nice, i wonder if that also means that we won’t have to download the installers or can just download all of the game files directly. Should make installing big games a lot faster and also help with limited disk space.
