Matchmaking without Unity server

Unity Engine
1

Hopefully this is quite an easy one for you network gurus and I’ve just been incredibly blind, ignorant, stupid, or a combination of the three.

I have a multiplayer game (duh) which I can connect using the standard networking components. I’m pretty sure this uses the self declared host/player to host the game, but it uses something Unity’s side to deal with the matchmaking. This relates to the 100 CCU we are currently getting for free (I think?).

What do I need to have and do in order to separate myself from this? Say for example I wanted to use my own server, rather than something like Photon, do I need to install things etc?

Thanks

2

Well the match making service of unity is pretty nice and convenient but you can use your own code for match making.
at the moment unity’s transport layer API is not supported in none unity platforms but later on they’ll have it as server library (in roadmap) so your other apps in .NET and maybe other paltforms can use the same messaging system.
what a relay server does is that it receives all messages from all clients and sends them to others which are the target.
in order to understand targets of messages you should be able to understand unity’s message protocol for the low level api and in order to do that you need the mentioned library or a protocol documentation.
assuming you will have that in some months then you just listen to a UDP port on your own match maker and clients connect to it and then you just act as the relay of the messages.
If you can not wait until that then it is another story.
All this aid writing your own scalable match maker and hosting it is no easy task if you are not a network programmer and did not write scalable parallel code before so do your homework first.

3

Wow, that’s a hefty response haha.

I have no issues with using their matchmaking API (actually, its very slick) but more for the hosting side of it? Is there like a Unity MM installer I can install on my own server and point the game to that rather than their master server?

4

I think writing a simple tcp socket server that would handle all the matchmaking would be the best way to go in your case.

5

I’m also wondering this. So far all I can figure out is that you have to use Unity’s servers for matchmaking? You can’t create your own MasterServer/Facilitator on Amazon Cloud?

Can anyone confirm this or hopefully correct me?