Bespoke Networking

How about you start a game and instead of joining a dedicated server, or another player's game, it talks to a web based API. 

That API tells you where there are other players, where entities are, what the world looks like. Your client spawns those entities and keeps them in sync by constantly talking to the API.

This stuff is interesting to me. It's relatively unexplored territory, it has potential for games with tens of thousands of players on the same server. I think if we pick at it enough we can make something cool - or at least trigger the community to make something cool.

This month Rohan explored this by adding a websocket class to s&box. Then he made Towns as a proof of concept. In this game you connect to a remote websocket server, which then streams in the terrain and entities. 

You can't do much more than fly around right now, but it proves the concept and has highlighted a few areas we can make things smoother to support this better.