Does anyone know of a free way to have just a generated I.P address for hosting a game server?

3    30 Jun 2021 14:54 by u/Lethn

I'm a complete noob at this so bear with me but I've been poking around with the idea of setting up a peer to peer multiplayer game in Godot. Now one thing I've been thinking about is I'd like to host games for people to play test on and let me experiment with how the networking in Godot works. However I obviously don't want the people I'm testing with that might be complete strangers to know my I.P address. What would be the best way to handle this? It would be great if there was some kind of free option available then that way I don't have to worry about it eating away my money and can just test stuff whenever I want. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/networking/high_level_multiplayer.html This is the documentation of Godot's multiplayer for those who are curious, when you use the local I.P address you're just connecting to yourself and it isn't a real world test which is what I'd like to do when I'm synchronising players. Another option I suppose would be some way to mask the I.P address but I have no idea about that and I'm not sure it's possible as you of course need an I.P address to connect to on a peer to peer system to begin with.

8 comments

1 u/Lethn [OP] 30 Jun 2021 17:01
After doing some research I may have found the answer and it looks like Hamachi is going to be the best option for small scale testing at the moment weirdly. Then if I'm looking to scale up I can look at more professional hosting methods etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUIyIw83gVQ
1 u/JM342 30 Jun 2021 17:25
Haven't touched Hamachi in a hot minute but for a while I found it inefficient. Honestly if you have a Dynamic IP from your ISP you are fine for temporary testing. There's a command you can issue to get a new IP or just unplug your modem for like 30 seconds and plug it back in and you'll get a new IP from the pool. Port Forward on your router and maybe see about running the server on a virtual machine. Either way you go, make sure firewalls are properly set. When using Hamachi (it's been a literal decade for me so this may no longer be the case) your connection to other computers will appear as a local network connection where there are typically more relaxed firewall settings so devices on the network can see other devices on that local network (so if you have windows file sharing on for example, they can view those shared files. Shared printers can be another). In this case it would be better to give out the public IP because your isp/modem/router will firewall things out of the box. Again, not familiar with that game engine and haven't used Hamachi in long time. If they can view your IP the most they'll get is your ISP Name and the general location of where that ISP is but even that isn't necessarily guaranteed to be near the location you are in.
1 u/Lethn [OP] 30 Jun 2021 17:29
Hmm, well this is why I'm considering building a second mini-itx PC that I can easily wipe and mess with whenever or use for travelling, thanks for the extra information I don't know enough about this so any resources and tutorials etc. you can throw my way is appreciated. What I'm thinking of setting up is just some kind of really small 4 player game on Godot or something just to get started and then have people connect, if I'm streaming for example I don't want people to be able grab my video off replays etc. and then start attacking my PC through the I.P address. It's tricky, I'll have to keep poking around and see what I can find. I want to make it peer to peer because then I don't have to worry about hosting options and neither will anyone else, they can just fire up a server when they want even if the game is dead, I plan on adding peer to peer as an option for when my main game project is able to do multiplayer too. So you'll have the standards matchmaking but if that goes down you've still got peer to peer hosting which should future proof it, this will be on Unity though but that's a whole other thing I'm thinking about for the future.
1 u/reaper527 30 Jun 2021 17:37
your options for free solutions are going to be extremely limited. if the concern was only your dynamic ip, then you could use one of the various free dynamic dns services and it would be problem solved. unfortunately, you have said it's also a privacy concern where you don't want people to know your ip address, so that won't work (since someone can just do a dns look up, or ping, or wireshark the traffic). free proxies/vpns you are likely to run into various issues with speed/performance/caps presumably, given what you've said, is it a fair assumption to say that your "testers" will be a small pool of people you already know/trust? if so, dynamic dns from someplace like [freedns](https://freedns.afraid.org/) would do the trick.
1 u/Lethn [OP] 30 Jun 2021 17:39
Well that's way simpler thank you, I'm just covering my arse of course, I don't mind using my PC for hosting generally as I keep backups anyway, It's just a what if scenario and yes, the testers involved will be from a circle of people who generally wouldn't do that but you never know, I'll check out freedns, that might be the most straightforward answer.
1 u/Lethn [OP] 30 Jun 2021 17:47
Oh I just thought of something, what about a VPN? Would you be able to set up a localhost and then have people connect to you through a VPN rather than direct to your IP address? That might be an even better option. I could just use a random UK server then and have that as the place for people to connect to without any limits and still use my PC for hosting. Or would that not be possible as the engine would just blindly connect to the server and not go through to me the local host? Edit: This may be engine specific so I'll have to probably ask on their forums.