Hi guys!
Now we have an indie licence available at our homepage and as you can see there, the only restriction we have put on it is the number of licences that are available. I have in a roundabout way explained our thoughts on the matter below. But at our homepage is all the information you need to know.
You know that feeling when music seems to speak directly to you. You sense that you have something great within you and that one day this feeling will have transformed into something that other people can see and when they do, they will get the same feeling of liberty that you feel right now. This, my friend, is inspiration. We have all felt it and we know it to be catchy, infectious and uplifting. Yet, we see so little of it. It doesn’t make sense. Inspiration is instead a luxury, or even seen as a service that a loud man in a suit, on a stage, holding a microphone and talking about money, is doing. I too have been guilty of emptying the word by attaching it to sloppy clichés, but really, does it need to be this way?
I would argue that the simple truth is that most people live in a world where expectations are set at “good enough”. We rate ourselves by a formula of numbers of units produced, at a certain speed, with a good enough quality. The demand is infinite, your capabilities and resources are limited and no one will ever look too closely at what you have done since it will be consumed, replaced and forgotten soon enough anyway. We treat our costumers as children and provide them with a constant sugar rush of brand new shiny good enough things. It is all about marketing, we tell ourselves.
Let me tell you that it doesn’t need to be this way. Instead, listen to that voice inside you that tells you that you are better than this. You can do great things and it will feel great doing it. But afterwards, it might be even more rewarding as it will have the chance to inspire others to do great things. Do you see how compelling it is? Do you see how we seem to be designed for this purpose? Do you see that despite a lot of people that have been successful by doing mediocre stuff, there is a satisfaction in doing something really, really good that is much more rewarding than being clever and doing something good enough? Good enough is simply not good enough.
Still, it has been accurately pointed out that we at Unity Park are awful at marketing, miserable at maximising revenue strategies and simply foolish businessmen. It is not something we are proud of but it is sort of inevitable, I guess. We don’t want the largest amount of customers in the world. We want the happiest. We don’t want people thinking that we are good enough. We want our costumers to be amazed, awestruck and - yes - inspired.
We have been offered some great advice on how we could set up our indie licence of uLink and share our technology to a wider audience. At the same time we need to gradually adjust from being a development group into also dealing with support. Honestly, it is scary for us as we see ourselves as pilots that now have to take on a new role as flight attendants. We are outside our comfort zone. Everyday we learn new things on how to do this better, we understand new ways of how to improve uLink to make it of even greater use. But how many new costumers can we handle and still keep our level of quality in support and development? The answer is ten. Or rather, we think we can handle ten new clients this year and after that we will be able to have a less restricted number of indie licences.
But for you other guys that for some reason need a licence, we are willing to sponsor your project with a free professional licence. All you need to do is impress us, make us laugh or make us turn uncomfortably in our chairs with your creative request that you have obviously spent time on. If you convince us that you care about what we have done - we will put all our muscles behind your project, making sure that it will fly. If your project is non-profit, it is also much more likely to get our honorable free licence and support.
It seems as if we have a mac/safari problem with our homepage… we are looking into it right now.
EDIT: If you have AdBlock on in Safari you can have problems viewing some of the page images at our site. We recommend that you update AdBlock and start looking at pretty pictures.
Awesome! Here’s hoping a few jump on and grab those licenses while they can!
Can you exactly tell us the differences between uLink and Unity networking?
What i saw on your other thread is:
Can you extend and/or correct this list? (maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put such a “differences to Unity3d’s builtin networking” list on you homepage)
Where is the benefit for non MMOs or smaller multiplayer games when using uLink?
Thank you
e
I created a simple office level to show my bosses what we can do with the technology. I think it’s very easy to use and works like a champion. Running a server build from my home computer, everyone in my office connected in, running strong even on my iPad! 
Lmao! that looks great earl
Dear Ethan,
The differences between uLink and Unity/Raknet are too many to really list here but I give it a try. I will make sure we put up a comparison on our homepage very soon. But lets go through your specific questions.
We do not use Raknet and uLink is 100% written in C#. In our upcoming 1.1 version, we have made a UnityConverter that convert your Unity/Raknet project into uLink at a push of a button. We have since we started made sure that it is easy to move projects and with UnityConverter it will be as easy as it possibly can be.
Yes, we support UDP reliable/unreliable, in order/ unordered.
I don’t quite understand this question.
We are able to handle more players because the Raknet integration was not really done properly. A proper integration of any network would be able to handle >100 players / Unity server. There is no real magic to it. We have of course streamlined and optimized uLink in many ways but the real difference is basically that Unity never put the time to make Raknet justice.
We have not experienced any problems with our buffered Network.Instantiate calls. In our game Tanks vs Robots we have had no problems handling buffered Network.Instantiate calls for a 1 000 simultaneous players.
The main benefit for people that make non MMOs is that uLink is stable and convenient to work with. You will have your multiplayer game up and running faster then with any network for Unity (most likely than any engine) As it was molded out of an extreme environment (we have made several crazy prototype games), we have found it equally great for networked games of any size.
I will ask Aidin to add more detailed advantages with uLink as he is the one who made our team fall in love with making uLink.
This is excellent! I hope down the line we’ll be in a position to utilize your technology. 
Also, thank you all at UnityPark for thinking of the indies.
Thanks for your answers Christian!
With the point “you don’t support multiple clients or server or a parallel server and client” i meant, that it’s not supported to create a server and a client in the same gameinstance. Is that true? Imagine a test environment where you create a server and then create like 20 clients which are connected. Everything in the same app.
The converter sounds awesome. In my game BlobFoot i used Unity’s networking and it had so many bugs and pitfalls that i gave up on it. If you wouldn’t mind i’d love to give the converter a try.
If you want i could even send you the whole project for testing. It uses quite all parts of Unity’s networking.
Cheers
Ethan
Thanks for the clarification Ethan!
Let me try to answer your question now. We have built functional tests in NUnit that simulate several Unity clients and servers but this is done using Mono. With these tests we can simulate and test all of uLink with complete freedom. To really push the limits, we have been using Tsung to put massive load on the servers.
Neither of these test tools can currently be accessed through Unity. Right now you are able to simulate traffic and review statistics at your fingertips through the API. Which will also be accessible from the Unity Editor’s GUI in uLink 1.1
Unity Park <3 football. We will of course make sure that your game is converted but it is more exiting to let you do it yourself so that you can see how easy it is. We are releasing uLink 1.1 in a couple of weeks. We have actually designed a football game a little bit like yours as we have been looking into bringing voice chat to Unity developers in cooperation with Ericsson.
Need to earn that much money as fast as possible…all nighter time!
Your pricing is per game title? Really? With such a competitive marketplace out there now for Networking libraries. I would have though 500 Euros should buy a totally unencumbered license, not on a per title basis. And 7000 Euros for a non-indie license, still per title? Wow.
I was about to hit the buy button until I saw it was per title 
I am not starting off a cost of development discussion, or a business practices one either, but I truly believe the days of high cost middleware are gone and would expect to be paying a lot less for a library like this (per title) or 500 euros for unlimited titles. Just my opinion though.
You are correct that our licence is per title. And I am sorry to learn that you thought it was too expensive, though. uLink is very different from any other middleware library out there. However, I am happy that you took the time to both learn about it and let us know what you thought. Our trail version is still free and as earl showed, you can do a lot with it in very little time. Try it out and let me know if you still think it is too expensive.
Does uLink support writing in UnityScript at all, or just in C#? How would a uLink game support 100 concurrent players without the pikko server package and dedicated servers?
What a great showcase! Ehm… would you mind telling me more what you thought about uLink? How long did it take to make your office demo? And what did your boss say? Sorry for being so curious but it just made me happy reading your post that it made me want you to write another one.
uLink so support javascript/UnityScript. Though we think that C# is more powerful and just as simple to use that we try to make people use that instead. (We support Boo as well, almost forgot)
I am a firm believer in that you really should not believe what people say but rather go by what they show. So let me show you this simple game: Snow Box. you can download the source code and set it up yourself at a server that you are familiar with and have a go at it.
The main reason why it works as good as it does is basically that the Unity server have had an undeservedly bad reputation and secondly that we have made a good job at making uLink great. =)
Christian, Your Networking library looks great, no doubt about its quality (though the future 1.1 seems to address some missing stuff - based on your docs). I have read your PDF top to bottom, and though there is much in your library I wouldn’t use/need, you guys have definitely integrated it seamlessly and have covered all and extended much of the Unity networking solution.
I think 500 Euros is very reasonable for your library… just not on a per title basis. That’s all.
I respect that. I really do.
Some people never get enough… or it’s never cheap enough…
I’ve been working with some 3rd party middleware that was still in heavy development and still did cost 5 digit Euros… for 1 title… So, I don’t really think that the pricing is too expensive. But I think that for a lot of people who do games in their spare time, anything but free is too expensive.