If You Haven’t Heard Of WebTransport
It is a new standard that provides bidirectional data transport over HTTP/3. In many cases, it can replace WebSocket and WebRTC with less overhead. It has two APIs that come with it, one for sending data unreliably with Datagram API and one reliably with the Stream API. In this article I will explain what WebTransport is, and how it will affect web gaming! If you want access to my member’s only article where I build a HTTP/3 server in Go and WebTransport client become a patron today.
Why Is WebTransport Such A Big Deal?
WebTransport is built on top of HTTP/3 which means it runs over QUIC. Without going into too much technical detail this equates to lower overhead and faster more reliable connections. It is also bidirectional meaning you can read and write data to the server. The cool thing to me though is how you can send data reliably (with streams similar to websockets) AND unreliably via datagrams!
Imagine you are making a multiplayer shooting game with 64 players. In coding terms you need this data to come as fast as possible right? Well at first glance you might think that a reliable data stream would be the best right? After all if all the players are shooting one character you want the damage to come in order right? WRONG! You do that and you are at the behest of the slowest network in the game. By sending datagrams you get best effort delivery (let’s be honest only ~1-5% of traffic is lost in these types of connections) so you won’t block the other connections.
Since WebTransport is Client-Server this is a no brainer for real-time multiplayer web games! Low latency is a must!
What’s Next?
WebTransport is still in it’s early stages but I will be following up with a YouTube video and a follow up blog where I will build a WebTransport server and client application! If you aren’t following me on Twitter do so @mastashake08