So my goal is a game that would allow numerous simultaneous players; not quite an MMO, but large and persistent. I’ve worked through a few of the tutorials for Smart Fox and am convinced that it’s a good way to go for many reasons, but can I use Unity’s networking functionality along side it? Is it a good idea?
My main concern right now is the aspect of collision checking. Obviously movement needs to be checked server-side so speed hacks and such are kept in check. Doing this (specifically world collision testing) inside of an SFS extension seems very tedious. My unfinished thought is: could I do a combination of NetworkView and SFS? This would obviously require the Unity game to be running on the server alongside the SFS, as there will only ever be the one server (no player hosts). Unity’s NetworkView functionality would be used to handle movement/collision, perhaps interacting with SFS if needed, and SFS would handle most everything else.
I’m assuming in this case that the NetworkView movement/collision functionality is itself fairly hack-proof. If this isn’t the case, then I’ll scrap the whole idea. But if it is, I’m thinking this might be a feasible way to get good “free” collision detection (without having to figure out how to go about it in a java extension).