Consider switching to protocol buffers

[logsol]

@jeena I remember back in the day, we were discussing if we should use BISON to improve efficiency. In recent years I have been using Google Protocol Buffers (protobuf) successfully to reduce protocol overhead on bluetooth communications.

Comparison

Protocol buffers (Protobuf) and BISON are both data serialization formats, but they have different strengths and weaknesses. Protobuf is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data, developed by Google. BISON, on the other hand, is a binary representation of JSON, optimized for use in MongoDB. Protobuf excels in performance and efficiency, making it suitable for real-time analytics, gaming, and distributed storage systems. BISON is more human-readable and has more data types, making it a better choice for use cases within the MongoDB ecosystem

I think this would also help a little bit with cheating as you couldnt read the clear strings in the sockets inspector anymore, however protocol buffers can still be decoded with webtools even without access to the protocol definition files, at least you can get the nameless values. But yeah its just security through obfuscation.

[logsol]

https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js/?tab=readme-ov-file#usage

[jeena]

I remember when we did our Bachelor Thesis https://github.com/jeena/GGS we were contemplating what protocol to use, we implemented a custom one which looked like HTTP, but when we talked to Joe Armstrong (one of the inventors of Erlang, the language we wrote our Generic Game Server in), after a talk he gave, he also proposed to use a binary format and one of the ones which are already established, and back then it was Protocol buffers (Google) and Thrift (Facebook). He said just pick one established one and go with it.

[jeena]

But at the same time I don't think this is our bottleneck, is it?

[logsol]

@jeena Well I think it would make the experience better. This would compress our communication data quite significantly, so that would improve the game responsiveness.

Currently we’re sending json which is key+value plus json structure overhead. Pbufs would reduce that to value only. Less tcp packets per command means faster communication right?