Bugout: Browser-to-browser networking built on WebTorrent

https://github.com/chr15m/bugout

by popcalc • 4 years ago

74 33 4 years ago

github.com

popcalc• 4 years ago

https://mccormick.cx/news/entries/on-self-hosting-and-decent...

Blog post.

jonititan2• 4 years ago

Very interesting.

As well as other usages it seems this would be one way to host online games. The app itself being the only thing served centrally and then instances of the app get served by website visitor's to host their own private workspace/gamespace. So all data created in that instance would remain private to that instance and the clients that connect to it. Is that a reasonable use case or am I misunderstanding?

pmontra2• 4 years ago

Imagine a card game with a deck and two players. The deck knows which player got which card. Each player knows its own cards and the ones on the table. The deck should not run in the browser of one of the players because that player could inspect the status of the deck and know which cards were handed to the other one.

To answer your question: maybe, but for almost any game you need a trusted third party that holds the secret state of the game. A third browser somewhere or a headless server?

Exceptions: complete information games like go, chess and checkers. Everything is public.

Games with a dice like backgammon starts to be problematic because how can one player trust the dice of the other player? A shared random seed would let them know in advance all the rolls.

bo10243• 4 years ago

Cryptography can solve this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

denkmoon• 4 years ago

Most games just accept this. One of the most profitable games in history (GTA Online) is trivially hackable because there is no server maintaining state, it's just peers telling each other what they did.

yeneek3• 4 years ago

"how can one player trust the dice of the other player?"

I have an algorithm for that. To roll a dice: 1. both players create a random x bytes long number.

2. both players make a hash from their number and then send it to the other one.

3. players exchange their random numbers and check if hashes are correct

4. concat both players random numbers and hash it to get the final random number

By exchanging hashes, both players can be sure that other player didn't tamper with their random number after getting yours.

(edited formatting)

jonititan2• 4 years ago

In this instance the server is the browser of whoever started the session and the others are clients?

I was imagining a browser based Maptool. https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

noAnswer• 4 years ago

Multiplayer games of old where usually p2p. DoS attacks from sad losers an cheating put an end to that.

meibo• 4 years ago

A lot of things did, not just what you mentioned. It's a lot harder to replicate a high amount of data to a high amount of players in p2p, since you have to send that data to everyone you're playing with, and you're basically limiting yourself to residential connections/wifi which are still crappy and have a high amount of lag. For the kind of fast-paced games people make/expect nowadays, this isn't really acceptable anymore.

tomalaci• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder how long until we come full circle by integrating enough features in a browser to make them fully replace your usual everyday OSes.

dahfizz• 4 years ago

At which point they will be so complicated, and each browser will be subtly different, that we will invent yet another abstraction layer. Devs will stubbornly only target it, and we will add more and more features until....

teaearlgraycold• 4 years ago

I'm shocked (and a bit upset) we aren't taking the mid-way step and treating browser tabs as comparable to apps in DE taskbars.

drakythe• 4 years ago

ChromeOS would seem to be the answer to this question, no?

throwuwu• 4 years ago

This is rekindling an interest I had in doing exactly the same thing. Nice to see another implementation. I’ll have to revive my old code. I think the key to getting uptake would be making it easy for anyone to live edit their copy and have the changes propagate to peers. Also some easy way of browsing what connected peers are hosting.

Waterluvian2• 4 years ago

Two things bewilder me:

1. Why is video conferencing in 2022 still such a disaster?

2. Why is it still so freakin’ hard for me to send a file of arbitrary size to someone?

I’m really getting optimistic about #2. But I worry it’ll be limited to nerds or attacked by established parties using the usual means (like making it impossible on popular devices in the name of anti piracy)

feross3• 4 years ago

For #2, see https://wormhole.app which is built with the same WebTorrent library mentioned in the original link. Works on iOS, Android, etc. all platforms as far as I know.

Disclosure: worked on WebTorrent and Wormhole.app

Waterluvian2• 4 years ago

Wow thanks! I’m going to set it up with my wife and see if it passes the “don’t need to be a nerd” test. :)

Edit: there’s nothing to set up. Despite what the TLD might imply, there is no app. It. Just. Works. Remind me to complain more about things that have historically sucked.

hoosieree• 4 years ago

This is awesome, maybe I can finally stop texting myself links to PDFs to read on my laptop.

rakoo• 4 years ago

Does it work when you close the tab or turn the computer off ? This is the last thing that makes wetransfer and friends mandatory

ranguna5• 4 years ago

For #1 I think it's simply a bandwidth and latency issue.

Say you are using webrtc to do a video call. Now imagine the same thing but with 10000 peers sharing their video. That means each participant has to upload their feed 9999 time while at the same time download 9999 videos from random peers around the Internet, each one with their own bandwidth and latency restrictions and each one doing the same thing as you (uploading and downloading to/from 9999 peers)

feross3• 4 years ago

It’s cool to see folks using WebTorrent tracker servers to bootstrap p2p connections for other apps. I’ve also seen some native apps doing this with the mainline BitTorrent DHT.

Disclosure: I’m the original author of WebTorrent

dang• 4 years ago

Recent and related:

WebTorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33790186 - Nov 2022 (137 comments)

nunez• 4 years ago

// javascript why

The question I ask myself whenever I enter a JS codebase lol

This is really cool. Actually serverless apps!

Bugout: Browser-to-browser networking built on WebTorrent

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