I’m interested in experimenting with some multiplayer games now that I’ve bought iPhone Advanced, but to be perfectly honest, having had no interest in this previously and as such no experience, I have no idea where to even look for the information in the Unity documentation!
Can someone explain to me:
a) What I can expect to achieve using Unity Pro’s networking capabilities (.NET sockets?)
b) Where I can find enough iPhone specific information to get me off in the right direction?
I would second this request. There really is not much documentation (if any) anywhere on this. Has anyone ever had success achieving this in Advanced? I’m still on Basic, but would seriously consider Advanced if there are any examples on how to use .NET sockets…
I was under the impression from the License Comparison page (Real-time tools for 3D, AR, and VR development | Products) that the iPhone versions do not offer access to either .NET sockets or the RakNet multiplayer offered with the PC/Mac version of Unity. This does not mean that you can’t make multiplayer games however.
The biggest win that you get with iPhone Advanced as far as multiplayer is concerned is the newly added support for C++/Objective-C plugins. That will allow you to write your own multiplayer library (or use a library somebody else has developed) for use with Unity.
Whatever you are able to write with a pure TCP or UDP socket onto which you build your networking
Sockets are no unity thing they are global standard network basest level technology and you can find tousands of articles and hundreds of books on the topic.
There is no documentation to it in Unity as it has nothing to do with Unity at all.
Its OS level functionality wrapped in “nicer looking” .NET functionality.
Check out MSDN on sockets as well as the Windows and OSX documentations
Right - rewind a bit. Unity iPhone advanced “supports sockets” therefore there must be some information about the commands to use if nothing else?
I can work out the theory behind using sockets, I’m sure, but I can only implement something if I know which commands to use to access those sockets!?
It can’t be the case that I have to write a custom Objective C plugin to do this - otherwise Unity could say that Advanced supports whatever you like - as long as you write it yourself!
Again, its no Unity functionality, as such there is no documentation to it in Unity.
You don’t need any ObjC for it too.
You just need to use plain common .NET functionality. (to give you an example, all the string functionality is plain .NET too, no Unity functionality for example)
Its .NET functionality which is available only to iPhone Advanced licensees, in Unity iPhone Basic the functionality is not present.
Search the MSDN for Sockets to find out more about it.
Here are a few beginners tutorials to get an idea what we are talking about
(this is a german article, I hope / assume that msdn automatically redirects you to an english counterpart)
Check also the menu on the left for other articles on the topic
Raw sockets should go just fine. And we’ve already started porting RakNet to iPhone, though don’t expect it very soon. There’s still plenty of work!
I feel that after more or less proper implementation of RakNet we’ll invite developers who actively use networking to our full and closet but famous beta list.
Not necessarily, you’ll be using a .NET library to get your sockets going but you should be able to call into that with either C# or JavaScript from inside of Unity.
Oh, and FWIW, if you want to try all this before you buy then drop an email to sales@unity3d.com and request a trial. Tell 'em HiggyB sent ya.
