Multiplayer games often want to present players with a list of servers to choose from, with information about each server's current state such as server name, selected map, and player count. To support this, metaserve provides a toolkit for aggregating small "heartbeat" blobs of information from game servers and distributing the aggregated data to clients on demand, labeling each blob with the address of the originating game server. Metaserve does not enforce any structure within an individual heartbeat blob; it's up to calling code to decide what information game servers will publish and how it is encoded.
A system built using this toolkit consists of three types of logical entities: meta servers, game servers, and game clients.
Every game server maintains a connection to a meta server, sending a heartbeat blob at regular
intervals. To implement a game server, connect to a meta server, then use that connection to
construct a metaserve_heartbeat::Heartbeat and send new heartbeat data at regular intervals.
Game clients may connect to a meta server to receive the set of currently-connected game servers
and the latest heartbeat from each, updated at regular intervals. Game servers are identified to
clients by the IP address and port they contacted the meta server from. To implement a game client,
connect to a meta server, then use that connection to construct a metaserve_client::Client and
recv lists of server updates as they occur.
The meta server stores the latest heartbeat from every currently-connected server and broadcasts
changed heartbeat data to clients. A complete implementation is provided in daemon.
All communications are performed over QUIC, using quinn connections. Downstream code is
responsible for establishing connections and recovering from connection loss if necessary; this
ensures that arbitrary connection configurations can be used.
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.