Bullets over the Network

Unity Engine
1

Hello all,

I’m stuck trying to solve the shooting system over the network.

I’m using a pool of bullet-objects already instantiated for performance and the bullets can change (increase it damage) if the player wants to.

I can’t figured out the best way to communicate the instances over the network.

One option I’m thinking is that the owner shoots and in the other side a fake bullet is fired. (the owner computes the damage and sends it with RPC). The drawback is that if in the other side the gun is not pointing correctly the player will see that bullet shouldn’t hit him.

Other option is having a NetworkView component on each bullet, and keep them synced (position, rotation, components, vars)
Is it too much if I put a NetworkView component in each bullet? Because could be easily 200 bullets flying around and I don’t if it will be an overhead for the network.

Thanks for your help.

Tell me if I should explain better something.

2

Bullets with their own NetworkView is overkill

You could send a I’m Shooting message and the direction etc of where you are shooting and then instantiate bullet prefabs on the other players scene.

3

If you want physical bullets, as in rigidbodies, you should let the player who fires them do all the calculations for whom he hit, where he hit, etc. since you can’t reliably replicate them on another client or the server.

The remote clients/server should just get a single bit which says “player X is firing his weapon” and then just play the shoot FX on that player with whatever weapon they have equiped atm.

4

Thank you two very much.

I’ll try to do it.

5

I use a raycast shooting system. Performance-wise, I think raycasts are way more efficient than using actual bullets.

What I do is cast a ray from my player and detect whether it’s hitting an enemy in the game. If it is and we’re shooting then I get the enemy’s Photon networkView and send a RPC:

var pv = hit.collider.gameObject.GetComponent(PhotonView);
pv.RPC("ApplyDamage",PhotonTargets.All,weaponDamage);

Then on the enemy’s health script, I execute the ApplyDamage function :

 @RPC
	function ApplyDamage(weaponDamage : float){
	health -= weaponDamage;
	}
6

Raycasting is awesome, but I want to use bullets so players can dodge (and have bouncing bullets, etc).

Thanks for your help.