Gonnect

A simple online game matchmaking server.

Features

You can run any command or subcommand with the help flag to see descriptions, examples, and acceptable flags.

Here's a summary of the available features:

Server

A server can be started by running the serve command, and specifying a handler. Currently the supported handlers are:

• player
• match

Example:

> gonnect serve match --port :8080 -u admin -p honeyisgood

Some endpoints require basic authorisation; See the help print for this command for information on how to change the default credentials.

player

This will expose a GET player/match endpoint; Requests to this endpoint will be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The server will attempt to find a match for the player as long as the connection is maintained. Once found, the match data will be returned in a JSON response and the connection will be closed.

match

This will expose the following endpoints:

• GET match/all?state=ready - Returns all matches found matching the specified state
• GET match/{matchId} - Returns a match with the specified matchId
• POST match/{matchId}/end - Sets the state of the match with the specified matchId to ended

Worker

A matchmaking worker can be started by running the match command. A match size (ie. player count) can be set via the batch flag; The default is 10.

Example:

> gonnect match --batch 5

This will run an ongoing process that will create a new match whenever enough players are searching.

Future Work

This section lists features that will likely need to be added, in order to make this usable in a real life scenario.

Matching by criteria

Players will usually have some context attached to them (eg. rank, region, match mode). This will need to be taken into consideration when matching players. Additionally, player "standards" should drop depending on how long they've been searching for match.

Technical Upgrades

This section lists potential upgrades for some areas of the application.

gRPC Server

Using gRPC for the server components instead of the current REST/Websocket implementation could result in the following benefits:

• Protocol Buffers allow for the requests/responses to be typed (and fast)
• Application client code can be generated in several other languages
• Matchmaking and player server implementations can be standardised

PostgresSQL

PostgresSQL asynchronous messaging and notifications could be utilised here. An immediate example would be to replace the DB polling during player matching.