I’m investigating writing a graphical MUD with unity and am researching approaches to prototype for the game. I have ~20 years development experience and have done networking, database, UI, and game development (hobbyist) so I’m not a complete newbie.
What I’m looking at doing is essentially a MUD/MMO (I use MUD because I’m targetting smalls scale of around 100-200 active users).
I want the server to be authoritative enough to prevent cheating to a reasonable level. The approach I’m currently evaluating is:
- Use Photon as a master server. It receives and relays all messages/events between the client and the “Zone handlerds” as well as handling player persistence and cross zone travel.
- For every level, dungeon or “zoned space” I’ll have a headless Unity running in server mode that handles the Monster spawning, Monster AI, and Item interaction, and loot spawning etc for the general environment. These headless servers broad cast events to Photon and receive player information from Photon.
Players will connect to the Photo master server which will load their character and then initialize the client to the correct level the player was on. Photon will then subscribe the player to receive messages (relayed via photon) to the correct unity that’s handling the environment the player is within.
Does this sound like a reasonable approach to even consider for a graphical MUD? Will it scale to a few hundred players at a time? How many players/monsters will a single unity head be able to handle generally?