Network questions and definitions

Questions & Answers
1

Hi.

I have some singleplayer android and ios games that i would like to make multiplayer. What i am looking for is the right name, for the kind of multiplayer server i want to make, so i can start searching properly, plus some questions about server games.

The game is a skateboarding game. Lets say i have 5 different maps. I want players to pick a map, and if noone is playing that map, or the current online instance of that map is full, create a new instance. If theres an open spot, they obviously just join that.
The players can not themselves host the server, as this would kick people off, or cause a pause, when they decide to leave, right?
There is no objective or time limit to the game, so the instance would have to run endlessly, untill everyone logs out. (I know i might have to forcefully move players, to other instances, if theres like 10 of the same instance, with just a few players in each, to avoid big amounts of almost empty servers).

What is that kind of server called - what should i search for, to read about how to do that?

A few other questions:

  • Can android and IOS players, play with each other in the same map instance?

  • Besides the skateboard game i also have a rollerskating game. Would 2 different games be able to share the same map instance, and play with each other?

Thanks in advance, to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

2

We’ll do it in 8 steps

  1. You need to buy a domain name, aka a web-address. For example somename.vg or yourGameName.com etc. Go to godaddy.com or Leazeweb.com and get it.

  2. You need someone to provide you with a server, unless you want to have your huge number of players all play on your PC. I rented mine from Leazeweb for ~$100 per year.

  3. Watch a few 10-min tutorials on phpmyadmin on youtube.

  4. Watch a few 10 min tutorials about SQL to complete your understanding of 3)

  5. watch a few tutorials about www class of Unity.

  6. The server you rent is a remote machine, far away from your home; It’s gonna be a long ride just to plug your USB into it with game files. Therefore, you want to have a remote control over it, with upload/download files to it. So watch a few tutorials about FTP client and how to use one.

  7. get your first database up and running on your server and connect to it through unity’s editor. You can now tell unity to save information and fetch information from it.

  8. watch a few tutorials about encryption and also about data hashing. This will prevent hackers changing info in your database, to cheat in game / steal passwords and usernames, and so on.

extra question, yes, it doesn’t matter which device the game is running from. You can have mobile phones play with pc, mac and even someone in the internet brouser.

another question. Yes you could have two different versions of the game (or even two different, unrelated games) read from the same database (which would then share information between two games, and could be also modified by those games).
Therefore, be careful, since one game could ask database to delete some info.

Aditionaly, your database sits on the server and its only purpouse is to store information. It’s up to you how to interpret this info. For example, one game might fetch “numBullets” from database, and assign it to your int bullets_count variable. On the other hand, some other game could also fetch “numBullets” from the same database, but assign it to int health, etc.

Good luck