Is UNet worth it? How does the cost of it come into play? Support Voice Chat?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m not new to Unity, as I have made several offline games. I want to try getting into multiplayer games but I’m a complete noob in this department.

I wish to create a virtual reality game for the oculus rift where I can have voice chat and be able to have four heads and hands in the room.

Is something like this possible with UNet? I hear that it is unfinished but I wouldn’t even be able to tell you if it is or isn’t. I hear Photon is quite popular but I’m not sure which is better to learn when I know nothing and only have Unity experience.

I was looking on unity site and noticed it was .49c a GB used. If that is the case, how do any indies made multiplayer games? Wouldn’t voice chat alone shoot that up to huge numbers so that if you have 5,000 players a day you would be paying thousands a month to unity multiplayer? I thought I read that UNet is Peer to Peer. If that is the case what are we paying unity for if the data is going between players?

Do either Photon or UNet support voice chat?

Any tips or experiences would be appreciated.

Thank you.

2

UNET is peer to peer, but you can also use the relay to ensure that players are able to connect through NAT problems. If you just wanted to do a simple P2P setup, you can just have all players connect straight to the server that’s being run on one of the players’ computers, just like old console games like CoD.

3

Do you know if there are tutorials anywhere to help one set this up to not use relay servers?

4

Hi @dberroa

Maybe you would be interested in my plugin which makes it as simple and reliable as possible to connect without the relay servers: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/58948/

I think you’ll find that voice chat is really not viable over the relays. You really want a direct connection which is exactly what this plugin will give you.

5

Funny that you noticed this. I actually emailed you today with my long list of questions about your plugin.

6

Oh ha, well there you go then. Hopefully my response was coherent. I also just finished writing a FAQ (mostly from your questions) that you can check out here: FAQ - NAT Traversal for UNET

7

Photon has a photon voice package and there is no built-in support for voice chat in uNet. Voice chat generally is more expensive than normal multiplayer stuff when it’s offered as a service due to high bandwidth usage.

About uNet you can use it without the match maker as others pointed out.