Sorry If I might sound profound, but I been given this privilege by my team to share with you, the rest of the world, the absolute joy of using this fantastic tool. We call it uLink.
Network is somewhat of an abused child when it comes to gamedev. People say it is so hard and troublesome, but the fact is that it is never done properly. That’s why it needs to be reinvented over and over again. uLink has changed that. uLink was born out of disappointment but made to inspire and built to last.
Instead of me ranting features, I made this short video where I made Bootcamp into Multiplayer.
Nice demo, but i have my doubts about the price: €8,680.00 will be a no no for lots of people around here.
And considering the prices and conditions offered by competition, i will go with them at this point.
Also your server seems to be windows/mac only.
Unfortunatly the price is not up to me, but thank you for the question!
For commercial projects, this is a non-issue since it cuts your development cost into a fraction. Really nice indie projects will be given a license. Bribes, flatter and general niceness is encouraged.
Regarding platform, we support all Unity platforms.
I normally don’t like to be a negative on such a scale either, especially if something looks interesting as yours does which to me looks a lot like “Unity Networking + what people consider missing on it” (peer to peer, unrealiable RPC, full serialize RPC datatype support), layed out rather well going by API and Manual.
But I agree that the price is pretty high.
In todays environment with so many network middleware in place it will be interesting to see if this will work out in your favor as you are in the upper range of all these technologies with full proofen MMO technologies being cheaper ( HeroCloud / Big World Indie)
Unhappily your technology licensing reminds me a bit of NetDog which at release cost $30k for single server, undisclosed NDA private per project cost enquiries for the multi node real MMO technology, which has likely cost them any chance to hit market, resulting in a new low cost single node licensing which doesn’t reflect how solid, easy and performant it is when used appropriately.
I hope it will work out for you or that you decide to make it more approachable to Indies price wise which can not fork out 5 figures for networking middleware soon enough to not get “forgotten” again as other technologies with this kind of problems unhappily were, as I would love to see it in action due to the potential it has with talented developers that are capable of using it correctly and efficiently.
The only negative I saw is that its UDP only, while you mention “all platforms”, which with mobile networking in the mix might give some backfire.
Nice tool but I Prefer to Ultimate Network Project, costs 80$ and can same thing and I need 30 minutes for this.
For $10,000 I can license the Unreal Engine for my projects… You should offer your project to electronic arts and not to hobby programmers or low-budget companies.
Alright, I admit that this pack is very valuable to someone designing a multiplayer game, however this price is insane, you are selling a pack for $10,000 on a largely indie forum. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have that kind of money available for one pack. This forum tends to want work for less than $200, as that is their limit usually. I personally don’t think you will have much luck with this, however if you do even get one sale, you will have made more than me with all of mine.
@gamenut: I don’t think that $200 is reasonable for such a power tech either, $500 - $1000 per project would be reasonable out of my view as you are still bound to unitys limitation on platforms, dedicated server, multithreading.
The only thing that I dislike about the tech itself is the 30 day trial, that just does not work out for networking, a time unlimited version that allows your game to only have XX concurrent users in your game (make the trial license being forced to use a special trial master server which requires master server verification with the trial license to impose such a “per trial license” limit) so people can check if it really works for their purposes would out of my view be favorable (at the $500 - $1000 price tag it would be favorable, at 7000€ its just a must, after all you want to them to bind in and buy in into your tech not drop it cause they ran out of time)
I realize that $1000 is a perfectly fair price for something if it is worth it, however people here usually aren’t willing to pay above $200. An example of this is the MMO Character Pack post that started on the gossip thread recently, those models were clearly worth $1000 - $2000 as suggested by one of the other members, however many people there were complaining about the pricing.
I did and after seeing this selling for 10k, I’d rather buy 10 mmo models
TBH this doesn’t seem worthy to anyone who actually knows what they’re doing.
As far as I understand, all this does is run one game as server and others as client with master server in the mix. Which I suppose means that all it does is bind default unity networking into something that is easy to set up. But for that money I think developing your own code with full control would be much better.
I don’t see small people using this because of the price, I don’t see big people using this because they can do something like that on their own.
As someone else said, that networking project for 30$ or so bucks pretty much shows everything.
For 10k I could buy unity pro + iphone pro and android pro.
And a modeling package.
And since it uses the default unity networking, it means it’s not even capable of mmos. So for enthusiasts who want to make their own mmo, this won’t do either(but as someone else said, heroengine indie costs less and is a fully featured mmo engine)
So yeah, the product is nice, the price is an outrage.
Also on your site I saw that you compared with photon, and you said that photon doesn’t support p2p. It’s true, it doesn’t by default, but with a bit of coding you could easily integrate that.
And statistics? What kind of a feature is that?
Whoever decided the price did his calculations a bit wrong. Even industry proven tools are usually cheaper.
it actually does much more than unity networking. Already that it supports any serializable thing to be send through (unreliable) RPC is a serious gain, but so is peer 2 peer which allows you multi node server backend ends (this is also backed up by the redirect feature) which communicate through p2p RPCs
Thats why I think $500-$1000 per title is definitely in the reasonable range, given it works (not tested far), as this is definitely some usefull extra value over unity.
With some luck (I kind of expect it actually) the system processes its messages in distinct threads unlike unity whichs main problem on networking is that all runs in the main thread which for message handling on a server becomes a major bottleneck extremely fast.
Whats missing is information on the uGame related stuff when it comes to multi node server backend as you need some form of shared persistent memory. there is a note on it but thats all I found
if it is just wrapping around unity networking adding a few nice features then a $1000+ price definitely would be over the top but the docs on serialization and communication indicate that its not a unity network wrap just something that looks like it.
