Multiple world instances

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

I am working on a multiplayer world with a main server that all players connect to when they want to enter the world.

However when a max number of players have joined this world I would like to create another instance of the world for new players to go to in order to maximize performance and minimize latency.

Since I am new to Unity, do you have any recommendations on ways to do that?

Thank you.

2

you can try and minimize the traffic between the players and the server, to maximize the number of possible connections…

or you can create a similar server, then have the 2 servers communicate the positions/whatever of the players they own with eachother, tho i do not know how to do that myself :smile:

3

Thanks for replying.

Your first point is something that I am going to do in any case, however I have to limit the maximum number of players per instance. I want the users to login to the game and be automatically transferred to a low-traffic instance instead of listing all available instances and let the player choose from that ( like having multiple hosts in Counter-Strike for example ).

Oh and the players do not have to communicate with each other if they are in different instances…

I realize that this is a complicated thing to do so I am just discussing possible solutions…

4

all you need to do is see which of your servers have the least amount of players connected to it, you can do that using this thingy over here: Unity - Scripting API: HostData.connectedPlayers

  • look into ConnectGuiMasterServer.js script from the Unity Networking Tutorial.
5

So when you start the game from your main host, you create a bunch of servers, you then register them with the Master Server and when a player connects to your game you look through the hosts list and pick one to connect the player to?

6

yes, you can do that, using some similar code to this one [i did not test this, and it’s in C#]

//we get host data from the master server and place it into data
HostData[] data = MasterServer.PollHostList();
	HostData bestChoice = data[0];	//assuming we have at least 1 host
	//we go trough all the hosts we recieved, and memorize the one with the lowest number of connected players
	for(int i = 1; i < data.Length; i++){
		if(bestChoice.connectedPlayers > data.connectedPlayers){
			bestChoice = element;
		}
	}
//we connect to the host we found...
Network.Connect(bestChoice);

I commented the code a bit, I hope you will understand it.

7

Awesome, I’ll give that a go!

Thanks man!

8

I hope you will manage to get it right, cheers!