The Stellar Suite is a funny name used to refer to the 3 subprojects: Astral, Stargate, Hyperwarp. These projects work together to provide a complete remote streaming experience. Astral (a vite react app) serves as a frontend to Stargate (a very simple express backend) which then launches applications with Hyperwarp injected into them. The realtime streaming experience is made possible by the WebRTC standard and extensions on top of it. Essentially in more detail...
Minimal application launcher ui, to be worked on later. Most of it was written in the Summer of 2023 but it got quite updated as of recently. A stack of Vite, React, and Tailwind with shadcn-ui is used. The interface acts as a client to a Stargate server of your choosing, and ui takes inspiration from a certain app. Astral communicates with the Stargate backend and sends inputs through a shared protocol defined in the stellar_protocol crate in the Hyperwarp repo over a data channel for messaging with the "Host" program. Astral is not strictly requried, it is just a frontend and it's very possible I write a "native" client using react native at some point for different platforms. FOr now, Astral comes with limited mobile responsiveness and is usable on my only mobile testing device, which is an iphone which means inputs have not been tested. If anyone is able to test input on mobile please let me know in the discussions section.
This is the backend that manages launching applications (mostly random foss games). It takes care of attempting to isolate user data (not really) and is highly configurable via a single config.toml to provide whatever applications you need, It provides authentication, the launchable applications, and the notion of sessions to the Astral frontend. Here is an example of my development config file:
users = [
{id = "testing", password = "password"}
]
secret = 'blah'
managementOptions.hyperwarpPath = "/run/media/raymond/Data/Coding/Hyperwarp/hyperwarp"
managementOptions.hyperwarpTarget = "debug"
managementOptions.streamerPath = "/run/media/raymond/Data/Coding/Hyperwarp/streamerd/target/debug/streamerd"
debug = 1
[[appSpecs]]
displayName = 'Supertuxkart'
binary = 'supertuxkart'
id = 'stk'
poster = "/assets/stk.png"
background = "/assets/stk_bg.jpg"
description = '''
Karts. Nitro. Action! SuperTuxKart is a 3D open-source arcade racer with a variety of characters, tracks, and modes to play. Our aim is to create a game that is more fun than realistic, and provide an enjoyable experience for all ages.
In Story mode, you must face the evil Nolok, and defeat him in order to make the Mascot Kingdom safe once again! You can race by yourself against the computer, compete in several Grand Prix cups, or try to beat your fastest time in Time Trial mode. You can also race, battle or play soccer with up to eight friends on a single computer, play on a local network or play online with other players all over the world.
'''
[[appSpecs]]
displayName = 'Open Transport Tycoon'
binary = 'openttd'
id = 'openttd'
poster = "/assets/openttd.jpg"
background = "/assets/openttd_bg.png"
description = '''
OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which players try to earn money by transporting passengers, minerals and goods via road, rail, water and air. It is an open-source remake and expansion of the 1995 Chris Sawyer video game Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
OpenTTD duplicates most features of Transport Tycoon Deluxe and has many additions, including a range of map sizes, support for many languages, custom (user-made) artificial intelligence (AI), downloadable customisations, ports for several widely used operating systems, and a more user-friendly interface. OpenTTD also supports local area network (LAN) and Internet multiplayer, co-operative and competitive, for up to 255 players.
'''
[[appSpecs]]
displayName = 'glxgears'
binary = 'glxgears'
id = 'glxgears'
description = '''
Testing application
'''It is also capable of running the underlying applications with debug tools such as valgrind and flamegraph for debugging crashes and performance issues that may be introduced. It manages audio via pulseaudio/pipewire null sinks.
Most of the focus for the past few weeks has been here. It's the most time consuming, nontrivial, and cursed part of the project.
Hyperwarp is a big Rust based LD_PRELOAD library that invasively modifies (good luck running this on a game with anticheat) the runtime behavior of any binary it is injected to.
A variety of things are hooked into like swapbuffers and it currently supports OpenGL only but at this point in time it's "capture" feature capability "works" as a MVP but there are some caveats (performance possibly) that will be listed in the Hyperwarp docs soon
Oh yea it's also configured with environment variables that are meant to be controlled by Stargate, will also be documented.
TLDR: Currently SDL hooking is quite good, so if you have a linux game that uses SDL for input and windowing, chances are it'll work out of the box with keyboard and mouse. Gamepad support requires a moder enough SDL2 (can possible inject one with dynapi hack I think?). I have quite a few FNA games so I can confirm they work.
Hyperwarp's repository has more than one crate. Hyperwarp by itself can't stream it's framebuffer by design, the most it can do is provide a unix socket or similar to control the process as well as the capture mode which provides the current framebuffer as a raw image in /dev/shm (this will def change with future capture methods). There is a seperate binary crate called streamerd (streamer daemon) that connects to that unix socket and feeds the frames into Gstreamer (which has proven to work before based off a poc of abusing it to play minecraft remotely ), but currently it only goes to the autovideosink element for testing. They share a crate called stellar_protocol to share protocol definitions and standardized serialzie/deserialize functions. streamerd is designed so in the future it should be modular enough to accept inputs from sources other than the Hyperwarp shared library to be streamed.
At this point in time, all 4 projects work together to make Celeste playable over the local network but more work is being done to stabilize streamerd for multiuser use.
And the web frontend I've decided to call Astral.
I am in the process of moving the repos out of my github account with a hell lot of random things into this github org but I'm trying to figure out how to move them without breaking my current git remotes.
These projects you should also check out.
- Selkies Gstreamer - state of the art open source webrtc over gstreamer.
- Netris - Takes a new approach and focuses more towards running games.
- Neko - a sharable virtual desktop over webrtc using go's pion