Today, we released new packages of the Photon and the MMO Demo to the wild.
We are getting closer to a final form for Photon 2.0 now. Classes and namespaces are cleaned up and the workflow is more logical. We finally added more documentation and there even is a guide how to update from RC3 to RC4.
The MMO Demo became its own download, including server and client source. The hope is to make it a more complete package, instead of spreading it across client and server SDKs. Accordingly, we included “pure” DotNet clients as well as Unity3D ones.
On the server side, it should be much cleaner and easier to understand now. We are still working on the documentation but the readme(s) and chm file should be a good base.
If you used the package from Photon RC3 or even v1.6.2, give it a try. It’s free for up to 50 concurrent players.
I’ve read posts from Dremora and Jashan on the Photon forums so I know they’ve given it a good test drive. I don’t know if this is the time or place (I apologize in advance if it isn’t) but I would like to know their general impressions (and any other Unity users who have used it). From the forum posts it appears the photon designers are very helpful.
I’ve been sticking with my own lidgren based custom back-end solution but my “To Do” list has me wondering if there isn’t elegant 3rd party solution I’m over-looking (I didn’t care for RakNet for various reasons)
Photon is a very solid and performant solution and actually well designed, making it far easier to implement own things. Their design even helps to have a solid, scaleable code as the way you implement things helps / ensures it.
The new Mmo Sample as per RC4 was also quite a bit streamlined and simplified when compared to the RC1 through RC3 versions of it that were quite a bit more complex than the new one. I’m sure that people coming new to Photon or are new to the matter in general will surely like the new Mmo example over the old one.
With the Unity example I keep getting multiple,
‘Assets/Photon/Player.cs(12,1): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `MmoDemo.Client’ could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?’
However all files have been compiled properly and everything is in the right place.
Tomme: obviously something (MmoDemo.Client) is missing.
Did you compile the complete solution in Visual Studio?
I just tried once more and stumbled over a potential problem: if the path to the solution file includes any space in it, the copying process at the end fails. But in that case, VS tells you that copy failed…
Sometimes a simple “rebuild all” helps if no other reasons are obvious.
In fact it’s really worth downloading each iteration of the MMO demo (if that’s possible) to see what the changes are - it’s quite insightful to see what they’ve done where, and how it might have affected things.
At the moment, it’s not possible. We might be adding a “older releases” section to downloads but some just become outdated and non-functional over time.
Of course we hope that the latest demo is the easiest to learn from
I was quick to delete the RC3 files when RC4 came out. As it should turn out, there are actually about 15-20 instances of errors like this from the pre-built version of the mmo demo they sent. These errors did not exist in RC3. From what I can gather, the code itself is fine, it’s just there is no MmoDemo.Client.Unity or w/e for the script to use.
Code, for example, is something like:
Using MmoDemo.Client.Unity(something or other)
and there is no MmoDemo.Client.Unity to use included in the RC4. So it’s an incomplete download.
I’m not at home atm to give the real example, but that should detail it enough for someone to figure out/fix?
The RC4 of the MMO Demo is kind of incomplete, yes. You need to compile the provided solution and copy the Island Demo, before you run the Island demo.
Our packaging script stripped the compiled dll’s from the package (which we will fix for next update).
Edit: It seems Mono Develop (at least the version anticipated with Unity 3) is able to compile the required solutions. I’m unsure about what I changed while trying this, so no “tutorial” just yet, sorry.
Two more known issues:
The readme.txt does not tell you that you have to compile the solution first (this happened unintentionally).
For ease of use, avoid spaces in the path to the solution file. With spaces, it will fail to copy the required dlls to the “assets” path.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Feel free to message me, if you need the compiled dlls as download (if you don’t have Visual Studio).
