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dot-browser

A server-browser client — DQP over UDP, DQP as JSON over a WebSocket for browser builds, and A2S for existing tooling, behind a list model with sources, filters, sorting, favourites and history.

dot-browser is the asking half of dot-server-query: a query client and a list model. That addon has answered queries since the day it was written, and until this one nothing in the family had ever asked one anything.

Requires dot-core. dot-server-query is what it asks and is not a dependency — the wire format is implemented here and no class from it is named.

Usage

var browser := DotBrowser.new()
browser.add_source(DotBrowserSourceList.of(PackedStringArray([
    "eu1.example.com:27015",
    "127.0.0.1:27016",
])))
browser.entry_updated.connect(func(entry: DotBrowserEntry) -> void:
    table.redraw(entry))
add_child(browser)

await browser.refresh()

for entry in browser.filtered():
    print(entry.describe())
    # 127.0.0.1:27016  A dot server  dm_atrium  8/32  14 ms

Asking one server everything, for the panel behind a clicked row:

await browser.query(entry.target, PackedStringArray(["info", "players", "rules"]))

Sources

A browser knows how to ask a server what it is. It does not know which servers exist — that is a different problem with a different answer per deployment.
DotBrowserSourceList Addresses typed in, or a JSON file you ship.
DotBrowserSourceBackbone A community’s listing on the TMC backbone, read through a duck-typed client.
your own Subclass DotBrowserSource and return targets.

A source produces addresses, never player counts. What a server is, is what it says when asked: a listing that has not heard from a server in ten minutes still lists it, and the player clicking it wants to know that before connecting.

Three bugs it exists to not have

Every game that ships a server browser writes this, usually the A2S half, and usually with the same three:

  • The player count is humans plus bots. A2S has always written it that way, so a browser showing it presents a server with eight bots as an eight-player server.
  • Multi-packet responses get stitched together wrong. A socket refreshing two hundred servers receives replies interleaved, and a fragment of one response mixed into another produces bytes that parse and are wrong.
  • Refreshing hangs. Two hundred concurrent queries is a fan-out, and GDScript has two obvious spellings for that and both are broken.

In a browser build

A web page cannot open a UDP socket, so it can never speak A2S. dot-server-query serves DQP as plain JSON over a WebSocket for exactly this, and Protocol.AUTO picks it when the platform has no UDP — asking about the capability, not the platform name.

The wire format is a second implementation on purpose

Only dot-core may be a hard dependency. The self-test checks this implementation against bytes dot-server-query’s own encoder produced, rather than against itself.

Play