W4 Cloud Released - Full Godot Multiplayer - Free & Open Source!

W4 Games, the company formed by Godot founder Juan Linietsky and other key Godot developers to form a commercial ecosystem around the Godot game engine, have just released their second product, W4 Cloud.

W4 Cloud is a free and open source (AGPL v3 license...) complete networking solution for the Godot game engine. If you are willing to run your own servers, you can use it completely free. It provides all the usual networking stuff like matchmaking, server balancing, achievements and more in a Godot friendly way.

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[rp]

Hands on demo would be awesome! Thank you for the great content

[nati]

Would love a walk through of hosting a server with W4 and integrating this API. Even if I never use this service, it’s very valuable to see the concepts demonstrated in a new context

[zenmasters_games]

oh wow online multiplayer for godot! cheers my dudes 🍺

[RaveYoda]

Would love a walk through of hosting a server with W4 and integrating this API too but very cool!!

[MMuraseofSandvich]

6:00 Apologies for the wall of text, but I feel this should be clarified a bit.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, the following is not legal advice, I happen to know this because I binge-read Groklaw archives and The Illustrated Guide to Law for funsies. Yes, really.)

TL;DR: You only need to worry about AGPL compliance if you modify the code covered by the license _and_ distribute or publish it, and even then you could probably just set up a public GitHub repo with your modified AGPL library or even the patches needed to make your library from the original source.

The GPL (specifically version 2 or newer which has the "Liberty or Death" clause) stipulates that if you modify and publish a GPL-licensed work, you also need to publish the source code to your work under the GPL, not necessarily commit the modifications back to the source work (that said, putting your modifications in a PR at the source repo might be one way to remain compliant, assuming the maintainers accept this).

The AGPL was created in response to cloud products that don't run on local PCs, like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, or Autodesk Fusion 360. The concern was that a GPL-licensed application or library could be used in a cloud app, and any corporate lawyer with functioning brain cells would say, "Aha! This isn't distribution, it's running on _our_ servers! No source for you!" and they would likely prevail in court. The AGPL explicitly stipulates that even if it's running on a server in a data center somewhere in the Caymans, if a user is _accessing_ an app derived from an AGPL-licensed app through a public network, that constitutes distribution, and the user is entitled to a copy of the source code. Other than that, it's exactly like the GPL: Anyone is free to use and modify an AGPL-licensed work, but if they publish their modified derivative, they are obligated to publish it under the AGPL along with the source code.

The reason why some companies like Google don't like the AGPL (and are publishing "criticisms" of it everywhere) is because they have huge libraries of cloud software that may or may not have code derived from AGPL-licensed code in them, everything is interconnected to a ridiculous degree (because of bean counters), and bringing all of that into compliance would be a huge pain and cost, so their lawyers and managers really, really, REALLY don't want people to find any trace of AGPL code in their applications. The irony of this is, every giant cloud company has made trillions of dollars off of GPL software (usually Linux), and because the AGPL says they can't circumvent the license in cloud apps, they're upset that some day, someone can potentially stop them from making more money than most countries' economies off of freely distributed software.

Generally speaking, the goal of the GPL and its derivatives isn't to make life harder for for-profit companies, it's to protect communities of developers who write software for everyone from abusive businessmen. And we should be glad that this is AGPL-licensed, because if it were GPL-licensed, a company could use it in their multiplayer framework on their servers, without giving anything back to the community that made the software possible in the first place.

[nowherebrain]

I'm honestly not really sure how I feel about this....and w4 games in general....it has not turned out to be the godot helper as it was touted at launch...and now I worry, when something like this can actually detract from godots own multiplayer development...not talking about server hosting...yeah. I mean it has to make money, that's fine..I get it. but something, maybe it's just me, feels off...since the console stuff HAD to be done outside of godot..that made sense..but now we are seeing odd stuff that could be done in house. That, for me, is a slippery slope.

[ukrsolid]

it will be nice to see simple example of W4 Cloud in action

[MarcosCodas]

This is fantastic 👌🏻 they even added the automatic matchmaking. Bravo.

[adog]

i really like the way they monetize it, it makes perfect sense to offer hosting services

[ShiloBuff]

I would love a hands on! Multiplayer is definitely lacking in Godot so i want to feel hopeful with this. Thanks for showing this!

[codelinx]

This looks awesome. Would love to see some content on this just for general knowledge and info

[draiic]

I would love a dedicated video or series on how to use this!

[Cammymoop]

This is potentially very very good for small quick multiplayer godot games

[opusdei]

6:27 a small correction. You dont have to commit to the original project (pull request). But you have to make the changes available.

[in-craig-ible]

Godot are really taking advantage of their recent surge in popularity.

[UltimatePerfection]

Frankly I'd love to see some work being done on P2P networking so that each player could host their own lobbies, with the only thing on a remote server being the list of lobbies. Like in the good old days of 90s multiplayer FPS games.

[jasonabc]

Godot just keeps expanding while Unity shrinks. I think the writing is on the wall for Unity now. Maybe they can get Microsoft to buy them out and expanded but MS has a bad habit of dropping support for this kind of stuff (hello again XNA)

[camzen]

They kept me pinging for quite some time now. So if you use your own server… you still have to be accepted on the w4 website?

[THRRKGUY]

Love that godot is getting more and more popularity

[Volt-Eye.]

Can't you ban these Spam Bots for Eternity ?