Say hi to Quilkin, an open-source UDP proxy
For a game client to be able to connect to a server, you would typically share its IP address with the client in some way, as part of a matchmaking process.
This has several disadvantages: the IP address may host other game servers, or be reused for other games further down the line, so having anyone access it makes it challenging to protect it from attacks, like DDOS attacks against the server IP or malicious attacks against the game server itself. If the address is reused, these issues may last for a long time.
There’s also little we can do in the way of packet shaping when the game server and game client are talking to each other directly. We’re at the mercy of what our players’ ISPs decide to do as far as routing is concerned.
T his brings us to Quilkin, an open-source UDP proxy we’ve started working on with Google Cloud and that we’re now open-sourcing.
For now, this is an early 0.1.0 alpha release that lays a solid foundation for us to build upon. The plan is to keep working on it so that we can use Quilkin to solve the problems mentioned above, and so that other games studios, no matter what size, can do the same.
