Integrated Hamachi (VLAN/ LAN on WAN) support.

[Lune]

The announcement of online local multiplayer seemed more like a missed opportunity to me than a good idea. "Game streaming" is a nice set of buzzwords, but in practice, generally sucks. When I first heard the words "online local multiplayer", I immediately thought of Hamachi and virtual local networks over TCP/IP. I was completely hyped over the thought of being able to play my older disk and couch multiplayer games again with the same friends who once took up room on my living room couch late at night.

Instead we got game streaming, but just.. more. More bandwidth, more processing power, and more latency.

I would have much rather seen Hamachi style virtual networking added into the steam client. Integrate it into the friends list as an option to make a "steam pipe lobby", then add friends into it to create a virtual network which then could be used to play games with a LAN multiplayer option.

Games would need to be run locally on each player's systems, but eliminates the need for one massive host sending multiple game streams, and the hassles related to that. Moreover, it would require each user to purchase the games they would be playing which in turn could net revenue for everyone in that chain.

I personally think this would much more readily appeal to the existing middle aged gaming market, rather than trying to hop into streaming and finding that their hardware specs or their ISP are just not capable of the type of stability needed to stream to multiple other clients simultaneously.

The current mentality of trying to "fix" latency in streaming (eg: Stadia AI, offloading processing onto the end user 'host') seems to miss the issue that in most cases, it's our actual connection that's the issue, and no amount of being clever about prediction can fix not being able to shove all that data down the tube.

[Cathulhu]

There's a reason why services like Hamachi and Tunngle (which sadly was shut down) are pretty much dying. Games generally no longer offer a pure LAN mode. Can't remember the last time i had to use tools like that to play a multiplayer game.

You don't even need to forward ports in most games anymore.
While i wouldn't say no to such a feature, i don't see the worth of putting that much work into it for so few games that would actually benefit from it.

[Eldin]

引用自 Cathulhu：

There's a reason why services like Hamachi and Tunngle (which sadly was shut down) are pretty much dying. Games generally no longer offer a pure LAN mode. Can't remember the last time i had to use tools like that to play a multiplayer game.

Pretty much this

Nowadays, those services are used more for people to play pirated games online than for legit stuff.

[Start_Running]

引用自 Cathulhu：

There's a reason why services like Hamachi and Tunngle (which sadly was shut down) are pretty much dying. Games generally no longer offer a pure LAN mode. Can't remember the last time i had to use tools like that to play a multiplayer game.

Not as much reason to since there's very little fundamental difference between lan and wan. It's basically aboutdesigning the proper ping and latency tolerance into the game.

The online local multiplayer though well, that's working more like how emulators did multyiplayer. Essentially creating a dummy client that just collects inputt over network and streams. The biggest problem of course will be keeping things in sync which i think will work well enough since only one computer is actually running the game.

[meganinja]

引用自 Lune：

The announcement of online local multiplayer seemed more like a missed opportunity to me than a good idea. "Game streaming" is a nice set of buzzwords, but in practice, generally sucks. When I first heard the words "online local multiplayer", I immediately thought of Hamachi and virtual local networks over TCP/IP. I was completely hyped over the thought of being able to play my older disk and couch multiplayer games again with the same friends who once took up room on my living room couch late at night.

Instead we got game streaming, but just.. more. More bandwidth, more processing power, and more latency.

I would have much rather seen Hamachi style virtual networking added into the steam client. Integrate it into the friends list as an option to make a "steam pipe lobby", then add friends into it to create a virtual network which then could be used to play games with a LAN multiplayer option.

Games would need to be run locally on each player's systems, but eliminates the need for one massive host sending multiple game streams, and the hassles related to that. Moreover, it would require each user to purchase the games they would be playing which in turn could net revenue for everyone in that chain.

I personally think this would much more readily appeal to the existing middle aged gaming market, rather than trying to hop into streaming and finding that their hardware specs or their ISP are just not capable of the type of stability needed to stream to multiple other clients simultaneously.

The current mentality of trying to "fix" latency in streaming (eg: Stadia AI, offloading processing onto the end user 'host') seems to miss the issue that in most cases, it's our actual connection that's the issue, and no amount of being clever about prediction can fix not being able to shove all that data down the tube.

i agree with it, i really HOPE steam puts an way to make it possible, especially for old games that have no multiplayer modes anymore but still have LAN support

引用自 Cathulhu：

There's a reason why services like Hamachi and Tunngle (which sadly was shut down) are pretty much dying.

some people want to play old games online and lan can help it an lot, specially games that main official severs are dead

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Remote Play Together

How will that do for you?

[Waryth]

No, I don't want to have this feature. I've used those apps before and they've been modifying my Network settings and sometimes slows down my connection at least for Tunngle's case.

It also allows file sharing control (for Hamachi) which is bad for the community when most are underage. If they get to use the settings wrong or been manipulated to use it, they'll blame Steam for it and be held liable.

[ayylmao]

I agree, but isn't multiplayer with Steam like this, like in Terraria and Valve games?
I've used ZeroTier One and it worked good for me.

[Ghostman]

I feel this is less of a suggestion and more of a rant about your misunderstanding of what remote play together is there to solve, despite it being explained quite clearly.

Local Multiplayer is not the same as LAN and remote play together is to solve an entirely different problem to the one you have.

Also, as people have stated above the vast majority of games do not have a LAN mode, and the ones which do usually have an online mode anyway. Realistically speaking this isn't worth the development time just to appease yourself and maybe 1 other person on the entire steam platform.

Local multiplayer refers to games which don't need to use a network, the players join either splitscreen or on the same screen (VIA THE SAME DEVICE) such as street fighter/cuphead/battleblock theatre etc. and they usually have their own controller to provide input to the game.

Local Area Network mode is when games effectively host a private server which only allows connections from the local area network (usually devices connected to the same router/switch).
Aside from that the whole point of a LAN Mode in games was for LAN parties/tournaments and the internet wasn't great back then so at the time it made sense. The whole Hamachi/Tungle thing was a hacky trick and most people only used it to host Minecraft/Terraria/other game private servers without portforwarding. Literally I know of nobody that still does that.

[Lune]

Alright, addressing some of the points in here.

1. @Waryth It should be possible to build/instruct the driver to disallow network drive/file sharing without user input. But yes, it would need to be a hard-coded thing to prevent abuse in that manner.

As for network slowdown, that's also something that could be put into the driver settings, just making the connection priority less than zero so that Windows, (and presumably other OSes) do not try to route the internet connection through it.

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2. @Oogway This isn't meant to supplant Steam Connect support. That works well enough. This would let you play games that used to support online connections but no longer are supported through their official channels, or games that did not have an online lobby system, but supported gameplay over wired networks.

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3. @Elevenones Get off the soapbox. I know what RPT does, I know what it's trying to solve, and I know the difference between LM and LAN modes.

It's admirable that they're trying to make LM games playable online, but game streaming isn't going to do anyone any favors. You're fighting the latency of 1-3 other people on top of your own, while also hoping you have enough upload bandwidth for 1-3 (Maybe 7 if it's one of THOSE games) 1080p+ H.264/5 encoded streams.
(At minimum, the same requirements of streaming to Twitch, at most, 3 to 7 TIMES the bandwidth requirements. This while most ISPs offer highly asymmetrical connection speeds. Even on gigabit fiber, I only have ~25-30 mbs upload unstable. Not to mention data caps and whatnot.)

The argument of latency can just as easily be applied to LAN games, but they're -designed- to cope with that, compared to LM games that typically have zero fault tolerance and expect zero latency.

And while I'm sure a lot of people used tunnelers to host Minecraft and whatnot, what you must realize Hamachi was around much, much earlier than that. I'm talking late 1990's.

It's main purpose (for gamers) was playing things like Starcraft, Total Annihilation, CnC, Atomic Bomberman.. hell even emulators like ZSNES before online services were available, or stable.

Taking it one step further, it was used for jank like getting a PS2 into LAN play mode via an ethernet passthrough. Playing Armored Core 2 and 3 through hamachi and a network coordinator were big for me, and there's any number of other games that this worked for.

Nowadays, online games with servers that closed, but still have LAN support would be the main beneficiary to this. (EG Anything that ran on Battle.net 1.0, Microsoft Zone.net, GameSpy Network, ect) There's a huge retro game movement, and short of having to code one's own lobby server software, the only alternative is using a tunneling service.

So no, it wouldn't be just me and one other person. It would be me and a pretty good chunk of the 25-35 y/o demographic who grew up on this stuff.

[Ghostman]

Again it seems you judge it based off of your experience with Twitch which is not designed for low latency asynchronous streaming and complain how it isn't a virtual LAN service, when again it's entirely unrelated.

Instead you should be comparing this to services such as Parsec which already offer streaming of local multiplayer games.
Depending on how Steam implements this it could be better than Parsec, and Parsec already has barely noticeable latency due to them using some new APIs which were introduced with Windows 10.

The only valid criticism you have is your concern that the latency will spike as more players join (anything after 2). I have noticed to some extent this can happen when you have 3 or more players via parsec and one of them is using a dodgy WiFi connection but that is not due to the concept of streaming being inefficient. IT IS DUE TO THEIR PEER TO PEER NETWORKING MODEL as they are basically sending a new stream to every client rather than having 1 audiovisual stream to a relay server and then relaying that to the other 3 players. Long story short, they send FOUR streams which is really inefficient so the great low latency video capture they get from the windows 10 API is vastly damaged by their shoddy netcode.

Either way, streaming of local multiplayer games is already something which works fairly well, is used by a lot of people and makes sense for steam to integrate this directly into the steam platform rather than letting players use third party tools. It opens this up to more people and the feature is a good thing for the community.

In regards to your point about required upload speed, your upload speed should be more than enough. If parsec works flawlessly with 15mbps for 60fps 1080p but has a recommended requirement of 5-10mbps upload for it to work well, then I'm sure steam could do this with a lot less.

Overall if you had started this off this suggestion without comparing it to or complaining about remote play together and kept it as a separate suggestion then it would have more weight behind it and maybe could be taken seriously.

Ultimately I don't think steam will add this feature for the following reasons:
1. Most of the games you mentioned are non-steam games so in their eyes "not a steam problem".
2. It would open up a whole can of worms. (E.g. they would need to design the infrastructure for this, they would need to think about the security aspect of this and any legal implications, it would be a nightmare to add, etc.).
3. They don't have any statistics to back up your claims that a lot of people would use it. As a company they need to be sure that the decisions they make are profitable so will not invest in an idea unless they can get behind it 100%.
4. Hosted VLAN services are essentially VPNs.

[Lune]

I'll concede that your counter is a fair one. A more objective, rather than comparative post, would have done better. Hindsight ect, w/e.

I will say though, that from what has been announced for RPT, it'll function exactly the same as Parsec does, making a new stream for each new client. I don't think Steam wants to put in the money or architecture to have relay servers for the service. Could better code help? Sure. Always. But as long as they're doing a multiple-in-multiple-out system, it'll have all the same fundamental issues.

We shall see what it actually does though.

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As for my net being sufficient. Lol. I wish I had that kind of optimism. Cox Comm, CableOne, South Central Communications.. So far all three have had -significant- issues with uploads. Once my connection hits more than about 5-7mb up, the downstream turns into a 700+ ping packet loss nightmare. Sure, it's possible to get up to my rated upload speed, but for whatever reason, doing so effectively DDoS's my downstream.

The story is much the same for most of my friends on fiber or hybrid fiber/coaxial connections. So far our buddy on S/DSL is the only one this hasn't happened to. What the underlying issue is, I have no idea, and the ISP's just tell us to upload less and accuse us of using torrents and shut down any support call.

I digress.

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But to put in on the points you've made, yes, they are non-steam titles. While admittedly, it's not their problem, I suppose it was naive to think someone would actually make an officially supported and designed platform to run those old titles.

Most of the security issues could be handled on a software or driver level, as stated before. I'm not going to be one of those people to say 'Oh, just do x, it's easy.' I'm a programmer. It's not easy. And there's always something that slips under the radar of even the best thought planning and framework process. But if the dialog was opened even for just the possibility, it might open the door for a smaller company to take it up even if Valve doesn't want to.

Statistics. Yeah. Big one here. One guy saying one thing really pushes a lot of weight. There would obviously need to be surveys, discussions, research. Sooner it starts, sooner it finishes.

And yes, hosted VLANs are more or less VPNs. The problem is, there's no service that currently allows the creation/dissolution of VLANs dynamically and only for a limited amount of time. Hamachi allows you upto five users on a VLAN for free (At least used to.), but it was only five users, static, and could not be turned on/off or have people added/removed as needed. It was definitely not designed for gaming. But then, what is? You could pay to have more than five people on a network, but, because of the complexity of setting up, connecting to, and managing the entire network, it was pretty much unsustainable.