Ask HN: What do AAA games use for their chat and other “real time” stuff? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do AAA games use for their chat and other “real time” stuff?

Sorry for the newbie question. But I'm really curious. Is it something like RabbitMQ or XMPP?

I know that Fortnite [1] and League of Legends both use XMPP. Eve just moved to XMPP [2] somewhat recently. There is a Hackernews thread that talks about the Eve article already too. [3]

[1] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-...

[2] https://blog.process-one.net/eve-online-chat-is-moving-to-ej...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445365

Thanks! XMPP seems to have a steep learning curve for beginners. I'll take a look into it regardless.

Don't let this one thing be the thing that stops you from making a game. These types of rabbit holes can cost you an entire project. Keep in mind that AAA games often have several engineers working on this type of component. Unless you have that level of funding, consider just using what works until it no longer scales.

That's definitely great advice. I really appreciate!

I found this book [1] as a good starting point in understanding how XMPP works. It was written almost a decade ago, but it is really good for walking you through examples of how the protocol works to accomplish something.

I also recommend using Gajim. It's a really solid XMPP client that has a feature that I found super helpful. In it's advanced feature, it has something called the XML console. You can see the stream of XML between the client and the server to see a real example of what is going on in the background. You can even send your own XML and see how the server will respond to it.

I'm pretty new this stuff as well. At my work, I'm helping build a chat solution for one of our products. XMPP seemed to make the most sense for us. I'm not an expert or anything, but I found these super helpful.

Good luck to you!

[1] https://oriolrius.cat/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Oreill...

Hey man! Thanks for the link. How's your project going? What's xmpp like?

Follow up question: do such games use something different for chat vs gameplay, and if so why?

There is usually a gameserver, connectserver, dataserver and chatserver - so yes, it's different. The reason is that it can be split between multiple computers. Also maybe you would need two gameservers (realms) but only one of others.

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