Game Server: Broadcasting UDP packet over Internet?

Question

A friend of mine made a small LAN-playable game, and ask me to change it, so it could be playable over the Internet. I don't want to make huge changes on the client application.

When a game is created, the server keep sending UDP BROADCAST packets to tell everyone that a game has been created. Now, I just need to change this BROADCAST in order to send these packets to a group of internet IP-adresses.

Can you tell me if the following solution is a good one: I would create a room server, lets call it 'room-broadcast-server', that contains IP adresses of everyone who joined the room. Then, the clients, instead of sending that BROADCAST packet, would send the packet to the room-broadcast-server, which would broadcast this packet to everyone who joined the room.

The problem is: The clients would receive these packets from the 'room-broacast-server' and they would try to comunicate with the room-broadcast-server, instead of comunicating with the machine that created the game. I would like to fool the clients, so that they think the packet came from the game server, and not from the room-broadcast-server. How can I make it?

Answer 1

Spoofing the source address isn't a suitable mechanism for your normal application protocol. It requires special permissions on client machines, it will be dropped by some networking filters, and is just generally gross and anti-social.

Since you're modifying the clients anyway (to send the messages to the game server instead of to the broadcast address), you can simply have the game server append the "true source" of the packet to each packet it sends out, and have the clients expect and process this information in the packets that they recieve from the game server.

Answer 2

The basic concept (one centric lobby server + multiple game servers) of the 2nd option from Dean is good and very common even in retail online games. One thing I don't understand is why you want to fake IP addresses. Clients should not care what server ip address is as long as it gets valid packets from it. Also, imo, you don't need to create a separate room(?) server since a game server can / should manage a list of clients as clients are connected via a lobby server.

Answer 3

Are you modifying only the server, or both the server and the clients? I would think that it would be simpler to just remove the broadcasts altogether and have the clients explicitly choose the server they want to connect to, rather than relying on the server broadcasting.

As a version 1, you could simply require players to type in the IP address/DNS name of the server in the client in order to connect.

For version 2, you could add support for a "lobby" where you have a (known) central lobby server that both clients and server connect to in order to find each other (so servers connect to the lobby to announce their presence and then clients connect to the lobby in order to browse servers that they want to connect to).

In a game that I have been writing (but on hold currently due to lack of free time :p) I had written the "lobby" server as a simple PHP+MySQL web application and had the clients and servers use HTTP requests to poll it for updates and so on. That way, I could host the central lobby server on a cheap web host and anybody could host games (the drawback is that cheap web hosts don't allow arbitrary socket connections, so I wasn't able to implement NAT punch-through on it, but if/when the game became popular my plan was to move the lobby server to a more expensive host that did allow arbitrary socket connections...)