Hey folks,
I just discovered Unity and have spend the last few days looking for answers to the many questions that I have.
Thanks to this extensive community forum and the wonders of the search function I found all answers except one.
Me and some friends are looking to make a small online rpg, just as a little hobby project and to play small campaigns in the future.
All of us are artists, we are capable of java and one of us knows a little python so we can script gamelogic.
If ever finished, the game would need to support a total playerbase of 400-500 people with at most some 100 online at the same time.
Now, from what I understand from the forums Unity can not do 100 simultanious connections at the same time out of the box.
apparently there are third party solutions.
How do I add this networking business?
is this something a group of coding impaired artists can do?
Are there any coding-free solutions that I could buy That give me something like a wizard where I enter server names, ip’s and such and it generates the goods for me? (We don’t want t0 spend more then 200 euro’s or so on that)
I’m not even entirely sure what question to ask you guys.
I just know something must be done networking wise.
Anyone who can explain what I need to know using terms that a code-impaired artists can follow?
I fear there is no option for you.
You could potentially use Unity Networking, but you will need Unity Pro for the dedicated server.
Other options like SmartFoxServer Pro or Photon require that you have some programming background or are willing to learn it and especially that you have a bit more funding than your $200. Thats hardly enough for the setup fee for a dedicated server which you will require, not talking about the monthly subscription cost.
Seems that whatever dev related board I go to, Dreamora is there to answer my questions 
Thanks Drea 
The 200 I mentioned is purely for a software solution.
I’m aware that setting up and running the server I need to support around a 100 folks is going to cost us way beyond that.
Or did you mean a software solution when you said dedicated server?
we don’t need a very robust server, we care not about cheating prevention 'n all that since all play will be with folks we know IRL.
We trust the client, It will be in the hands of our allies, not our enemies (to break with carmacks wisdom)
Just need enough to get adventuring parties fighting mobs.
Now, I’m willing to learn about backends but I want the simplest way out as learning networking was not our goal for this project (yesireeee gimme the magic “create WoW 3.0” button, I know)
Any solution where I’ll have to cut and paste scripts together into a sort of working mishmash will be fine.
What I read and understand from Unity networking says it does just that. I cut and paste some stuff from a wiki, say a prayer and hope for the best.
it won’t support 100 players as far as I understood it though.
Are you saying that I would need Unity pro for that to utilize the included server set-up?
Didn’t Unity-pro and Unity become one product with 2.6?
Now, knowing that we care not about cheaters, that we are already happy if we can see each others characters and hit the same mob, that we are willing to learn but wish to spend as little time on networking as possible (even willing to scale down max number of simultaneous players).
What would you advise us to do?
I meant the hardware and maintenance for it and the internet connection, right 
100 concurrent connections should actually be possible with correspondingly optimized scripts through the Unity Networking, but you might really need the headless client mode to do so because you otherwise burn a lot of performance for the media end only.
The headless client requires Unity Pro, the mode is not available in the free version.
Also an authorative networking setup would potentially not be optimal, because RPCs ignore SetScope which is something you might really want to look into.
Unity Pro is still Unity Pro. Unity Indie ($199) became Unity and is now available freely.
Photon would be an option if you want to go for a larger scale as it requires a more solid background (programmer) and comes with license fees that are targeted at professional developers, so unlikely an option for a private only environment.