I am wanting to make a multiplayer game and obviously I need a good way to incorporate multiplayer functionality (who would have thought that, right?). Since I am still very new to Unity, is there a good, easy to use, and most importantly FREE multiplayer thing that would work? I am willing to copy some code (I don’t know C#, and a little JS, but I know how to copy!), or follow a tutorial. I am not willing to buy something from the asset store, so there is no need to mention: “Oh there is a lot of things that match exactly what you are requesting in the asset store.”. Yeah, and they cost a load of moolah, which I don’t have to spend on this.
Photon is a separate Networking Library that you would have to download. Photon is free for up to 100 CCU I believe and then you have to pay for a license based on the amount of money you make per year (under $100,000 per year your a indie, over that you would no longer qualify for the Indie Prices) and based on the number of CCU you have. CCU mean Concurrently connected Users. Basically it’s the number of users you have connected at any one time. In General it would be 10% of your total number of accounts.
So as a general figure you could have up to 1,000 accounts with your free 100CCU license. Once you hit that mark or start capping out at the 100CCU mark you would want to upgrade to one of the paid licenses which I believe the cheapest one increases your CCU limit to 500.
I believe you have to set up your own Database. MySQL is real easy to setup and use in C# so it shouldn’t be that hard to get accounts and everything setup.
Photon Cloud it’s pretty much impossible to use a database… The Clients act as the Server. You NEVER want to give the Clients access to the database unless you want the whole database hacked.
You would have to use a webpage to access the Database. So it could be done but just more to it.
I gave up on Photon a long time ago. I still keep up to date on it’s development but I just don’t use it. It’s licensing (The fact that you need a license for every physical Server you run it on) sucks for a MMO since they require multiple Physical Servers.
Blenderite: If you are still learning scripting, you might want to return to multiplayer later on. While you can do a lot without coding, the results will be much better when you know how to script properly and did some game logic with that. Multiplayer clients suffer from lag and thinking about it’s consequences can be very very confusing and time-consuming.
JamesPro: Cool you’re still tracking Photon. I’m sorry we lost you due to pricing.
The monthly active users will be much more than 10 times the CCU (concurrent users, playing at the same time). It’s more 100 times the CCU usually. How many players have 3 full days per month to play one game?
You should be able to get at least 1000 CCU per server and for hugely successful games with 10+ servers, we have an Enterprise Deal, which is the maximum fee we take (no matter how many servers you run).
