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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T05:55:06+00:00

I hope this is okay to ask here as its more a request for

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I hope this is okay to ask here as its more a request for advice than a technical problem.

I have been developing a game using html5+js and my goal was to make it multiplayer. It’s a dungeon crawling game and my intent is to have a main village where all players online and in the village can see each other going about and talk and form parties but when a player enters a dungeon its a seperate instance for them and their party. Party size maxium of 4.

My intention was to use websockets and write a server in c#. The problem is I just found out that IE does not support websockets and is still holding around 25% of the browser market share.

my options seem to be to use websockets anyway and cut out the IE crowd or maybe drop multiplayer support. Someone else suggested that I just write world data to a database and have players read from it every frame and update that way.. it sounds horriable.

I found this socket.io thing that seems like it can use websockets OR do the same deal in other ways – but how does this effect me writing a server? If I use the c# implementation of websockets and socket.io will IE users be able to talk to my server?

Or there may be other ways of doing client->server communication that I don’t even know about.

To be completely honest i’m tempted to drop the multiplayer idea! But before I do I look to you guys for advice and experienced suggestions on how I could handle this. Thanks for your time and I hope this kind of question is okay here 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Do not drop the multiplayer idea! It’s way cooler with multiplayer. 🙂

    Socket.io is a Server-Side JavaScript library. This means that you need Node JS server for it. IE users will be able to talk with Socket.io server, because it uses other protocols if WebSockets are not available. For example: FlashSocket or XHR long-polling. The last technique is available in every browser that supports XHR, but it is inefficient.

    The greatest advantage of socket.io is the fallback. You can set it to start with any protocol (like WebSockets) and if the client does not support it, then it tries the others. It is really great, since you can use WebSockets (which will slowly but surely dominate web apps) and still work with browsers which do not support it, like IE or Opera or Safari. I don’t know whether there is any other library with this advantage.

    I don’t know any library for real-time connections for C# (I’m not a C# developer), but it is unlikely that there are none (look at this question). Also note that real-time connections require a bit different server architecture then normal HTTP requests, so probably you will need additional server for handling them.

    Also I think that neither nginx nor Apache handle WebSockets (without some hard core tricks) at the moment (but Node JS does!). I’m not sure though.

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