naia

a networking architecture for interactive applications

A cross-platform (including Wasm!) networking engine that intends to make multiplayer game development in Rust dead simple and lightning fast.

naia helps you to easily define a common, shared Protocol that allows Server & Client to exchange information. Then, naia facilitates sending/receiving parts of that Protocol as reliable/unreliable Messages between Server & Client, and also keeps a pool of tracked Entities synced with each Client for whom they are "in-scope". Entities are "scoped" to Clients with whom they share the same Room, as well as being sufficiently customizable to, for example, only keep Entities persisted & synced while within a Client's viewport or according to some other criteria.

The API is heavily inspired by the Nengi.js & Colyseus Javascript multiplayer networking libraries. The internals follow the Tribes 2 Networking model fairly closely.

Thank very much to Kyren for support & webrtc-unreliable, and to the Laminar authors, for the cannibalized code within.

Any help is very welcome, please get in touch! I am open to any criticism / feedback in order to better this project.

Currently guaranteed to work on Web & Linux, although Windows & MacOS have been reported working as well. Please file issues if you find inconsistencies and I'll do what I can.

For more detailed information, please look at the FAQ.

Demos

More comprehensive documentation / tutorials are on their way, but for now, the best way to get started with naia is to go through the basic demo, which demonstrates most of the functionality.

Server:

To run the UDP server demo on Linux: (that will be able to communicate with Linux clients)

1. cd /naia/demos/basic/server
2. cargo run

To run the WebRTC server demo on Linux: (that will be able to communicate with Web clients)

1. // go to (https://docs.rs/openssl/latest/openssl/) to install openssl on your machine
2. cd /naia/demos/basic/server
3. cargo run

Client:

To run the UDP client demo on Linux: (that will be able to communicate with a UDP server)

1. cd /naia/demos/basic/client/wasm_bindgen
2. cargo run

To run the WebRTC client demo on Web: (that will be able to communicate with a WebRTC server)

1. cargo install cargo-web  // should only need to do this once if you haven't already
2. cargo install cargo-make // should only need to do this once if you haven't already
3. cd /naia/demos/basic/client/wasm_bindgen
4. make serve
5. Web page will be blank - check debug console to see communications from the server

Known Issues

To run a miniquad client you will require the following be installed

sudo apt-get install libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev