Announcement on Lobby change to Steam

Should be beta testing fairly soon'ish. Owlbear will be back on the 12th, and we will know more then. Most of the team just got back from GenCon, so playing catch up from being gone for a week.

 

Hi, just to be clear, when i was working on the new lobby logic, I found some significant flaws in the underlying networking system which we need to make TCP/IP more reliable and build out any new networking system. I've started updating the underlying bits and have improved connectivity and performance of the base networking/transport logic by an order of magnitude.

That being said, there are a couple more network related tasks required before we can fully move to the AMQP system I've been building out to replace the PubNub solution.

Steam networking will happen after we get the application launched onto Steam. I had been banging my head against the wall working on steam networking without being able to test it from within steam -- annoying to say the least.

Additionally. we're considering moving the networking choices from the main Host/Join UI to the Session selection system.

Since our session system is whole our own, it seems like a good place for GM's to advertise connection data if they so desire. You will still be able to use pure peer-to-peer TCP/IP without a session, but enabling cache of that data into a stored session would mean you would not have to tell your players how to connect to you. And if you're hosting from a rotating IP address. hosting on your session would be able to update the stored IP and Port allowing for players to find you while you're hosting your game.

This is not planned as part of the 3.7.9 release we're doing RC builds for right now. but will be the main thrust on the 3.8 build which will wrap up the current user experience and networking changes we've been releasing in previous builds.