doubts with unet pricing

I undertstand that each GB of traffic cost you 0.49 and with wireshark I estimated a cost of 5kb/s/player I know I can optimize it but for now each player cost me 0,008 per hour?
(0,49 / (1024 x 1024)) cost of each kb x 5kb x 3600s or do I have to multiply it by the number of players you are playing with?

Haven’t got a clue, I’m pretty sure Unity will prioritise this though, can’t sell a service if nobody knows what to buy. I don’t know because the host does extra work. We need those debug features :slight_smile:

Um, if it is not always cheaper to do things yourself / rent your own servers/cloud by cutting out the middleman… then how do Cloud services make any money?

I am not talking about hosting it yourself on your home internet / PC. I’m talking about just cutting out the middleman and using significantly cheaper methods. And yes, it is definitely ALWAYS cheaper, otherwise the people you pay hosting for like Photon Cloud, would not make any money unless they owned all the server hardware themselves. These other services also provide security, 99.99% uptime, etc. For cheaper.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. It will go wrong. It will cost you dearly. How is that cheaper?

It’s fine you’ll find out.

Are you talking about a MMO, just having a matchmaking server, or what? That makes a huge difference. Unless you can provide a valid argument (legitimate reasons) then I don’t see how this is anything more than exaggerated fears. Also how can it go wrong when you host your own server & it is protected with 99.99% uptime from the same people who support the same middle-man services that charge you extra for the same thing? If something can go wrong there, then it sounds like it could also go wrong with Photon Cloud or Unity Cloud or whatever they use. Especially when it’s probably the same or very similar businesses supporting them that will also sell to you for cheaper than they charge.

The entire idea of cutting out the middleman consists of saving money by doing a little bit extra work.

Because you have this assumption that a) everyone is local to your server and not worldwide b) you’re capable of addressing issues and even getting it working and c) keeping it working when it is overloaded, slow, attacked, and so forth. Do you know how it all works? if you’re learning or intending to maintain it, you’re already losing time/money on it.

The benefit of a paid service goes far beyond having a box somewhere running some software. Pretty sure it makes business sense not to do what you’re suggesting. In fact, it’s considered a risk for medium sized businesses to host their own servers, let alone single developers.

That’s right. Things DO go wrong - and often. The fact that you and your customers never see it, is the reason you pay a tiny bit extra. The internet is an unreliable hell hole.

Can you tell me what is involved with cutting out the middleman? how do you run a relay server? how is it set up? What happens if it’s stack gets corrupted? Will you use linux and log in and fix it? if so how?

Thanks for getting back to us. I shall continue to work with UNET and hopefully by the time my game is ready for a public beta the Pro requirement will have been removed. I don’t suppose you know how long we’re talking? Weeks, Months, 6 Months or a Year?

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@SpaceMidget75
Sadly, i don’t have an ETA myself to even share. Like Richard said in the FAQ though, just message us when you’re ready. This isn’t a policy decision (but instead just a technical limitation) so we’ll find a way to support you when you need to launch your game.

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Anyone who comes to this post, needs to read this - and then re-read it. I’ve been on all sides of this, and approached it from every angle, and there’s a lot of truth here that can lead any small, or medium sized game company in the right direction based on these observations.

@JeremyUnity
Awesome. Thanks Jeremy. Apologies if I came across entitled. You know what it’s like when you think you’ve wasted days of development though.

I can’t find the link, but the Forge developers suggested cheap hosting & were the ones who mentioned it will ALWAYS be cheaper. Since they are seasoned network professionals, I am inclined to trust them over a ‘fear post’. Also, that is how business works. If you market yourself well or try to make the process easier, you can do the same services as your competitors for a little bit extra. You can also charge a lot of money for something that isn’t a lot of work, if people are willing to pay so they don’t have to handle it themselves (what is in esssence just a convenience fee). No reason to explain in detail, but business is business.

If you’re just running a matchmaking service, this fear is just nonsense. If you’re running some kind of super beast MMO cloud, you need more than what these ‘middleman’ services provide ANYWAY. So you have, what? This niche where you need a tiny bit of assistance but not a whole lot…because…“stuff happens” that these competitive server providers don’t handle but the middlemen do? What do these middlemen do that other service providers don’t also do for less?

This fear is quite exaggerated because it entirely depends on what you need. Not every game is small enough to not need an employee to maintain its servers but big enough & specifically in need of services these middlemen provide. What of the games that have small need or massive need?

Sorry, but when your need is small enough, it’s not a big deal to host it yourself by renting your own servers. That is definitely cheaper than paying additional costs for services you don’t need. There are also literally hundreds of options for this stuff…with varying prices & services, maintenance requirements. It is almost always cheaper to do things yourself than to pay someone else to do it. That’s just business. You don’t have this imaginary cost because you have to do extra work. That’s not a monetary cost, that’s a monetary savings. Let’s dispel with this notion that time is money, time is not money. Time is time. Money is money. That’s why they have different definitions.

I won’t argue though. If I could find that post I’d link it and you can go from there. Otherwise, I’m out. What an incredibly silly argument. As if there is somehow one universal need for all game’s network requirements, and as if they are all satisfied with something like Photon Cloud (which wouldn’t be enough if you needed more services they don’t provide or provide at an additional cost or could be too much if all you needed was something tiny).

OK. Good luck with your game :slight_smile:

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Thanks, and I apologize if I have any aggressive tone. (That’s just how I argue. Never any offense to anyone is ever intended. Even if I barely know what I’m talking about, I will argue like I am solid in my understanding, BSing included, hahaha!)

Idk how, since I tried finding it earlier & it took forever, but I found it right away this second attempt! :slight_smile:

Maybe I misunderstood the post or misspoke & used the wrong technical terms? I am self-taught, so I often do that. You’ll be able to tell what I was talking about here. However, I believe I understood correctly. (Correct me if I’m wrong).

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-multiplayer-unet-features.336203/#post-2193798

edit: Apparently the post right after his, is me making the same argument with someone else. Go figure. We are such creatures of habit… or at least I am :wink:

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You know what would be awesome? Someone writing up a guide to explain what the hell CCU’s are, what to expect with various types of games, and how much money we’d save if we went with No-CCU vs pay-per-CCU.

And included with it, UNET CCU limitations. Others can be included, but UNET must be priority so we can get educated on its costs.

Even after hundreds of hours reading about CCU’s and asking the same questions repeatedly, I still have a hard time understanding how many CCU someone’s game would take. How many “One CCU” is. The numbers are all over the place (which makes sense, given that it will vary on the software).

From my understanding though, paying per CCU is quite a bit unfair in many cases.

Forge Cloud seeks to remedy this industry standard by charging only for your CPU Usage & Bandwidth Consumption.

However, even with that I barely grasp the difference between that & something like Amazon/Rackspace.

It’s ok everyone is entitled to their own views, I stand by mine, and you stand by yours :slight_smile:
CCU - I thought I needed way more but when Photon quoted a few hundred thousand I knew I probably had the wrong idea, and then I realised I wasn’t understanding typical behaviour patterns in online games.

It does not help that its all very confusing without prior experience, hopefully Unity can fix up things for us so we can all understand it.

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If I think about that if the player send 20 msg/sec of his transform to the server then, if there are 30 clients the server need to replicate that message to all the clients so the number of messagges per second is exponential to the numbers of players in that match.

So in the equation I have to multiply it by the number of players right? And then the cost is expontial also

Can anyone like @JeremyUnity answer me

@8NeonBitGuy The cost is not exponential based on my understanding, it scales in a more or less linear fashion. Remember, they only charge for outgoing traffic from the relay, which means what’s coming out of the server to each individual client. My numbers look no different based on 8 player max vs 16 or 32. There might be a slight scalability difference when you factor in TCP overhead, but it’s negligible probably.

@GrimmyD well, look at the equation, if you have 8 players and everyplayer send 20 msg/sec to t server, then the server need to replicate all the messagges to everyclient so 8 players x 20 messagges/sec x 8 players again that means number of players ^2 x msg/sec/player right?

Hi @8NeonBitGuy

Bandwidth is only charged outgoing. Let’s say you have a game that roughly sends 1k/second to the host (which is usually small because it just contains changes specific to that client), and the host sends 4k/second to each client (which is larger than the client->server stream because it contains world and game logic updates). Your bandwidth usage is roughly as follows:

1 client (host only): 0k/second
2 clients (host + 1): 1k to host + 4k to client = 5k/second
3 clients (host + 2): 2k to host + 8k to clients = 10k/second
4 clients (host + 3): 3k to host + 12k to clients = 15k/second
5 clients (host + 4): 4k to host + 16k to clients = 20k/second
6 clients (host + 5): 5k to host + 20k to clients = 25k/second
7 clients (host + 6): 6k to host + 24k to clients = 30k/second
8 clients (host + 7): 7k to host + 28k to clients = 35k/second

As you can see the growth in a single host network match (which is how Unity Multiplayer works) is linear to the number of clients involved. In order to be exponential or worse you’d need a web where each client has connections to every other client directly, which starts to be so bandwidth intensive it’s unlikely more than a hand full of clients could join a match before performance is affected. Unity Multiplayer does NOT work this way for this reason (among others).

Even though we don’t work this way, i’ll try to put together an example of a network system that would in order to demonstrate the difference. In that world everyone would be sending 4k/second to each other client since everyone is basically a host.

1 client (host only): 0k/second
2 clients (host + 1): each client sends 4k to each 1 other client = 8k/second
3 clients (host + 2): each client sends 4k to each 2 other clients = 24k/second
4 clients (host + 3): each client sends 4k to each 3 other clients = 48k/second
5 clients (host + 4): each client sends 4k to each 4 other clients = 80k/second
6 clients (host + 5): each client sends 4k to each 5 other clients = 120k/second
7 clients (host + 6): each client sends 4k to each 6 other clients = 168k/second
8 clients (host + 7): each client sends 4k to each 7 other clients = 224k/second

As you can see it becomes really ridiculous really quickly so, again, we don’t support direct peer web networking and instead have a client/server host model.

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So you’ve obviously been through it from the standpoint that many are in here…looking at it from down the road and trying to understand it, and assuming the worst (12,000 / month server bills anyone?).

Can you explain how YOU understand it to work now that you’ve released a game, and talk about your typical. Like, Daily we have about 1000 users an hour, users connect, match up and disconnect, they’re connected for X amount of time, and use X amount of bandwidth, and it uses X CCU’s per hour in a claim and release fashion, and costs me X a month.

If that wouldn’t be to invasive for details into your services, I think that’d help people…maybe you’ve posted something like that already and I’ve just missed it.