iPhone 2D Multiplayer - what do i have to do?

Multiplayer & Networking
1

Dear CommUnity,

I’m out of breath. Having read through 20(!) Threads I found for my question and having read the related manual parts, I’ve still got no idea how to solve this problem:
I’m creating a 2d Multiplayer Game for iPhone. There’ll be 10 Players per Server. I want it to work over Wi-Fi and 3G.
So which technique do I have to use? A dedicated Server? Peer2Peer?
Assuming I need a dedicated server, is Unity’s Master-Server deployed to my debian-vps fitting my needs? Are their any tutorials how to deploy and configure the Master-Server? I’ve got some linux knowledge, but in all things c++ etc… i’m a noob.
Further, what’s with this GameKit API? Does it provide an own Masterserver thats better suited for iphone multiplayer than the one from Unity? Does this GameKit Plugin somebody submitted here finally supports multiplayer and matchmaking?
Sorry, I personally hate this “thousand-basic-questions-in-one-thread”-posts but Unity+Multiplayer seems the most undocumented part of this great game engine.

Tips and Hints are greatly appreciated!
Thank you very much,
moritz

2

I’m wondering a similar thing, except about Android. Any responses would help me as well more than likely.

3

bump.

4

Hi lunio,

I don’t have all of the answers for you. But I have some information that will hopefully be useful. I’ve done something similar to what you’re looking for using Flash (via AIR for Adroid) deployed to my Nexus one test device. And I used ElectroServer as the backend server. (I’m on the ElectroServer team).
http://www.electrotank.com/es5.html

You’d download an install ES. You can install locally for testing, and when ready for prime time you’d deploy it to Linux, Windows, or whatever remote server OS you have. You can learn how to install/deploy here:
http://www.electrotank.com/docs/es5/manual/index.html?operating_system.htm

ES handles games in a room-based way. So, if you want to have 10 player games then you’d have rooms that are capped at 10 people each. The people that join the room together would play against each other. You have the option to run custom game code on the server and scoped to the room.

It would work both over WiFi and 3G using TCP connection. I’m not sure if UDP will work on the device - I haven’t tried that with Unity. I know Flash doesn’t yet support UDP when deployed to the device.

Regarding your questions about the GameKit API - unfortunately I don’t know much about that, so maybe someone else can hop in there.