As we’re progressing with our game, we’re now looking at the possibility of online multiplayer. The problem is we don’t know the best way to achieve this as we lack to Unity networking experience. Would anyone have a good solution how the server(s) should be done.
How we’ve considered it
-PHP backend with login (yes, microtransactions are on the list also)
-The users send the orders they’ve made as XML to server
-Server doesn’t process the XML but sends it to others
This is the basic model, we realize that this could lead to hacking solutions, thus we’re looking for other solutions also.
So in short, could someone tell 101 when making a online multiplayer for tbs, and give suggestions how the server architecture should be done (we host all the games / players host their own games) and what benefits / problems architecture solutions would have?
P.S Do players host their own games anymore or are all the game servers provided by developers? Haven’t played any new games on PC so don’t know where the current situation stands
You might want to reconsider and make the servers more intelligent than what you propose (to prevent cheating), but also; for a long running game it would also be a necessity because it might be cheaper to synchronize clients with parts of the most recent world state rather than the complete initial state and a looong list of moves.
If you do decide to go with a fairly unintelligent model I would try to use an existing data service that already scales rather than implementing your own server, since the operations will be extremely basic: Set initial state, append to move list, fetch unfetched moves.
If you a looking for a less centralized system with player hosted servers, TBS will do well with server/client TCP networking. But if you’re doing a mobile game I don’t think this will be as appropriate.