Traffic Relay

For players matched together into a real-time game, the Manic API will first attempt to join the players together in a peer to peer fashion.

If a player's network (firewall) setup prevents Manic's firewall hole punching technology from connecting the player to the other players, the Manic API will automatically fall-back to using a traffic relay server for communicating with the problematic player.

This will be transparent to the other players as the Manic API will simply return the IP address and port info of the traffic relay server to those clients instead of the problematic player's IP address and port.

All peer to peer player connections (direct or relayed through the Traffic Relay Server) are via UDP.

The Manic Traffic Relay Servers are high-speed, high-capacity, purpose-built application servers written in C++. They are designed for one thing only - to relay traffic between two end-points as quickly as possible. The use of a Traffic Relay server will generally only add 20-30ms of delay to network packets sent between users on the same continent.

As a developer using the Manic service, you have two options to choose from when deciding how to handle bandwidth costs related to Traffic Relay.

1. you can choose to relay your game traffic through Traffic Relay servers running on Manic server infrastructure and pay bandwidth fees ($0.55/GB) to Manic or
2. you can choose to run the Manic Traffic Relay servers on your own server infrastructure - Manic will provide you with the Traffic Relay server software (for free) which you can install and run on your servers.