noray

A simple connection orchestrator and relay to bulletproof connectivity for your online multiplayer games.

Forked from Natty that aims to cover an extended scope.

Why orchestration

If you're already familiar with the topic, noray can help with NAT punchthrough.

If you're not familiar with the issue, I'd highly recommend reading Keith Johnston's article on the topic - it's very easy to follow and sums up the topic really well.

But to give you a short summary:

• Most PC's online are behind a router
• Routers will only allow traffic to your PC if it's in response to something
  • i.e. Google can't just send you traffic out of nowhere, but your router will allow traffic from Google if you've already sent an HTTP request
• Similarly, if you host an online game, people won't be able to connect to your PC
• NAT punchthrough is the process of both parties sending traffic to eachother
  • The first packets will fail, as the router doesn't see it as response to something
  • The next packets should succeed, as the router sees that your PC is already trying to connect to the other part

noray helps by orchestrating the NAT punchthrough process 🔥

Why relaying

Unfortunately, even NAT punchthrough is not always a viable solution, depending on your players' NAT setup.

To make sure that your players can always connect to eachother, noray can act as a relay 🔥

In essence, noray will dedicate a specific port to each player, at which others can send data to them. Any data incoming on this dedicated port will be transmitted as-is to the appropriate player.

NOTE: Relaying only supports UDP traffic.

Dependencies

• node v18.16 or newer
  • NOTE: Older versions may work, but are not explicitly supported
• pnpm

Installation

After cloning the repository, run pnpm install to install all required packages.

Configuration

noray can be configured through environment variables or a .env file. For available configuration keys and their purpose, please see the example configuration.

Usage

To run noray, use pnpm start or pnpm start:prod for production use.

Upon startup, the application will allocate all the configured ports and start listening for incoming connections. Logs are written to stdout.

Documentation

Protocol

To keep things simple, data is transmitted through TCP as newline-separated strings. Each line starts with a command, a space, and the rest of the line is treated as data. Example:

connect-relay host-1

The protocol has no concept of replies, threads, correspondences or anything similar. Think of it as a dumbed-down RPC without return values.

Flows

Host registration

At first, each player has to register as host ( even clients ). This is done by sending the following message to noray over TCP:

register-host

noray will reply with the host's OpenID and PrivateID ( oid and pid ):

set-oid [openid]
set-pid [privateid]

These ID's are needed for any subsequent exchanges with noray.

Don't forget to end your messages with a newline character!

Remote address registration

To orchestrate connections, noray will need to know each host's external address. This is done by creating a UDP socket and using that to send the host's PrivateID. This operation is idempotent, so you're free to send multiple packets until you receive a reply.

Upon successful registration, the reply will be OK, otherwise it will be an error message.

Connecting

Connecting can be attempted either via NAT punchthrough or relay. Since noray has a limited amount of ports to dedicate to relays, it makes sense to prefer NAT punchthrough whenever possible.

Regardless of which approach is taken, you'll need to host's OpenID. At the moment, sharing OpenID is not taken care of, you'll need a manual solution for that.

Once you have the target's OpenID, you need to send one of the following commands, depending on the approach being taken:

connect [openid]

connect-relay [openid]

The server will reply with the same command in both cases. For NAT punchthrough, it will reply with the target address and port ( e.g. 87.53.78.15:55759 ). For relaying, it will reply with the target port, since the target machine will be the noray server itself.

Example responses:

connect 87.53.78.15:55759

connect-relay 49178

Note that both parties will receive the appropriate connect command. When this happens, the parties should attempt a UDP handshake with eachother.

License

noray is licensed under the MIT license.