Good Networking Practices!

Unity Engine
1

I would like to start a thread that discusses all good working practices that involve networking. Ask questions here or post good ideas and solutions.

I am going to start by asking a question about closing/finishing a network game… what is the correct way to exit a network game cleanly?

The obvious thing is:-

Network.Disconnect();

But what other cleanup should we do?

2

I have a game where you have “game sessions” which take place in one level, and it’s obviously a good idea to make sure that any buffered RPCs are being cleaned up before and/or after any particular session. I do that on “game over”, which in fact just means “game session over”, and when loading the level (which is starting the session).

Also, I need to keep track on the server of the logged in NetworkPlayers and do some cleanup when “everyone’s gone” (just like after a good party :wink: ). I do this by simply keeping a List networkPlayers where I add and remove the players when they’re being added or removed.

That then looks something like (C#):

void OnPlayerConnected(NetworkPlayer player) {
    networkPlayers.Add(player);
    log.InfoFormat("Player connected {0}:{1}, currently {2} players online", 
        player.ipAddress, player.port, networkPlayers.Count);
}

void OnPlayerDisconnected(NetworkPlayer player) {
    networkPlayers.Remove(player);
    log.InfoFormat("Player connected {0}:{1}, currently {2} players online",
        player.ipAddress, player.port, networkPlayers.Count);
    if (GameData.Instance.IsStandaloneServer  networkPlayers.Count == 0) {
        log.InfoFormat("No more players, cleaning up...");
        GameData.Instance.Teams.Clear();
    }
    Network.RemoveRPCs(player);
    Network.DestroyPlayerObjects(player);
}

What you can also see in this code-snippet is that I have a singleton GameData which knows whether or not this is a “Standalone server”. But that, I can use different code paths where needed. I have a checkbox “IsStandaloneServer” in a game object component in my startup scene (probably would be best to have that in a “NetworkingStuff” game object, that handles all these things and is always available and accessible from everywhere via a “Unity-conform” singleton).

Jashan