FAQ

Is this true peer-to-peer?

Is this slower / more laggy than a direct connection?

Does this keep my public IP address secret?

Can I ban players from joining?

Do we still need a VPN solution such as Hamachi?

Does RCON work?

Does this work with dedicated servers?

Yes and no.The initial connection is formed by using Steam's NAT punch-through service, which works by treating both host and joining players as two equal peers. Steam's service then tries to negotiate a way for these two players to form a direct UDP/IP connection. However if no direct route can be established Steam will use it's own relay servers to bridge the two players together.However once the initial connection is established there is still a classic client-server relationship between the joined players and host player. Individually connected players will not have any direct communication with anyone apart from the host player, so if the host player closes their game, leaves it, or loses Internet connectivity it will drop for all joined players too. (There is no host swapping/migration.)You can find more information about the technical workings of this here:In principal when Steam's relay servers are used there would almost always would have a slight performance hit because of the additional routing/hops needed to bridge two player connections together. That being said Steam's NAT punch-through service and relay servers are generally accepted to perform very well and reliably, so there should be no appreciable quality loss with player connections. (Particularly as Sven Co-op is not competitive.) More benchmarking would be required to answer this question with certainty when Steam's relay servers are necessary.This would not apply if the NAT punch-through service was able to form a direct connection between two players. Performance wise this would work just as well as a classic direct UDP/IP connection.No.If Steam's relay servers are used then your IP address wouldn't be immediately visible once the connection is established, but because NAT punch-through tries to form a direct connection before falling back to use relay servers this involves exposing what your public IP address is.There is no option of which can force you to use relay servers only, and attempting to do this yourself by hindering NAT punch-through's direct connectivity won't help.This applies to both the host player and joining players.Yes.Just like before you can use the "banid" command to ban a Steam ID, for example "banid 0 STEAM_0:1:12345678".No. The point of this is no special case networking by the user is required at all. Using a VPN solution will likely degrade performance vs a direct connection.Using this connection feature will also be faster than a VPN solution such as Hamachi because the connections are as direct as can be. When falling back to Steam's relay servers is absolutely necessary it should be noted that these are purpose-built for linking up players using a game application rather than general purpose networking.No.RCON still depends on UDP/IP being directly connectable.This is less likely to be needed as a real player will always be running the game.No.Dedicated servers do not bind to any Steam account so there would be no way to associate a Steam ID with them. If this were possible it would also require you to have a separate Steam account, as the same Steam account can't be signed in AND actively using a Steam service (playing/hosting a game, using SteamCmd, etc) in two instances at the same time.Direct UDP/IP is still required.