ENet / How important is IPv6 support?
Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2023 11:26 pm
I already asked earlier today about this on the discord but didn't get a reply so I'm going to try here again.
I'm no expert on network protocols and would like to cash in on the advantages of UDP in regards to recovery from packet loss without jumping into the networking rabbithole myself. Our multiplayer game is currently using TCP via luasocket and working fine for reasons, a switch to UDP would be a QoL upgrade. Luasocket as far as I can see only implements UDP as is which doesn't help a lot.
So I looked at lua-enet and in general it looks nice because it does all the low-level wizardry parts like establishing a connection for a protocol that doesn't normally know connections.
However I did some research and it seems that the source library in C doesn't support IPv6 nor does it seem to ever intend to. I'm unsure of what the real world implications of that are and whether that should keep us from using lua-enet or not. Does this mean that players that are on IPv6-only would no longer be able to connect to the server? Does it still make sense to even bother with lua-enet at all? Or if those worries are nonsense, what are possible consequences I have to look out for?
(You can assume that I know what IPv4/IPv6 is and that I have a basic understanding of the OSI model)
I'm no expert on network protocols and would like to cash in on the advantages of UDP in regards to recovery from packet loss without jumping into the networking rabbithole myself. Our multiplayer game is currently using TCP via luasocket and working fine for reasons, a switch to UDP would be a QoL upgrade. Luasocket as far as I can see only implements UDP as is which doesn't help a lot.
So I looked at lua-enet and in general it looks nice because it does all the low-level wizardry parts like establishing a connection for a protocol that doesn't normally know connections.
However I did some research and it seems that the source library in C doesn't support IPv6 nor does it seem to ever intend to. I'm unsure of what the real world implications of that are and whether that should keep us from using lua-enet or not. Does this mean that players that are on IPv6-only would no longer be able to connect to the server? Does it still make sense to even bother with lua-enet at all? Or if those worries are nonsense, what are possible consequences I have to look out for?
(You can assume that I know what IPv4/IPv6 is and that I have a basic understanding of the OSI model)