Best server side data storage solution ?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I am currently developing a mobile game and looking for solutions to store FILE data on a server.
I found several solutions, such as just pushing files to the server, or using a File database, XML…

I would like some advice to pick the best storage solution, matching the use case I will explain below.

Can you tell me what solution would you use ? Using WWW or not ?

Use case :
A player can “build” a scene, and push it on the server. Every player can connect to the server and see the scenes built by anyone (with a thumbnail). Then, they can “challenge” others on this specific scene.

I can serialize my “buildings” to files, generate thumbnails. I will need statistics on every file, such as the best player who made the best “challenge” on a specific scene.

I hope the need is clear, if not, I will give more detailed information.

2

I will be releasing a new version of my Unity Foundation toolkit later this week. It has a number of features including an asp.net mvc web server included.

http://mmofoundation.com/

3

I personally would use a standard LAMP/WAMP/etc server as, chances are, you’re going to have to deal with logins and websites so you’ll be using it anyway. You’ll also have a larger number of server hosts to choose from as you wont need to be using a virtual server or anything.

4

None of the above answers actually addresses the question.

Asset bundles are designed for this kind of thing. I would just store them in Amazon S3 using their Unity api.

That’s a robust, simple solution.

5

Nice of you to answer guys, good stuff indeed.

Thanks for the help but I Tried to run your demo on my chrome browser… And it failed (unity plugin version not supported…)

OK about that, but my question was about the storage solution. Indeed I will need a server, but on this server, whould I use a SQL database ? xml database ? juste file storage ?

No doubt this is a robust solution, even if I hope that I will not need asset bundles, since I can summerize my model to a table of string (only simple elements, blocs/bricks).
About that, I browsed a bit the documentation, but I cannot judge before getting deeper.

6

Fair point, an SQL database would be my choice (and probably the choice of most). It will allow you to store your logins/serialised levels/thumbnails however I would also consider storing your levels in text files and storing the name of the file in your database to reduce the load on your db.