Hey I randomly checked your post when making sure swarm of minnows is still running...

I was a LAN party organizer back in the day, a year or two ago I had this idea to bridge online and lan party using p2p tech that I was experimenting with (based on bittorrent/kademlia), it actually works!

It's called hyper-nat, it's 100 lines of code that uses a kademlia based network to connect you and your friends (instead of searching for a file block you're searching for the other persons service by key, protocol and port

it lets you start a lan game, and allows other people to connect to your server, which appears on their machines as localhost

the cool thing here is you dont need to know the other persons IP, and you dont need to open any ports :)

what's interesting about it is it runs at direct-connection speed, since it uses p2p backpunching to establish the connection, you get raw UDP (and tcp over encrypted UTP) which pretty much is as fast as opening your ports on a static IP

https://github.com/anentrypoint/hyper-nat

I made a pre-compiled windows version of it too, which is the same app compiled with node 14 and nexe (I can't get nexe to work with a newer node yet), it's under releases.

We use it for doing anything that requires LAN over the internet, we used it to play counter-strike at surprisingly low latency over mobile phones, and stream motion capture data to make multiple people appear in 3d streams

If you want to chat some time, come say hi... https://discord.gg/an-entrypoint-367741339393327104