Photon Networking

Questions & Answers
1

Hello Everyone,
I am building a multiplayer game, and I want to use photon for it. As much as I look around the internet and Unity Answers/Forums, I cannot find any super in-depth explanation of how photon works. What I need is:

  • How do photon servers communicate with iphones
  • How would a script run a program to “lobby” players in random groups of 4
  • How would a program know if a player dropped out ie, hit the home button on an Iphone
  • How many players would the server need to deal with at a time. What I mean by this is, the photon server holds 60 spots for players. Is there an effective way to manage the players?

I know that this is a long list, but if anyone could answer even one of these, I would be grateful. Thank you for your time.

2

A late reply:

  • Photon communicates via UDP, which is being made reliable by our eNet-based protocol. Simply put: we use the internet :slight_smile:
  • There are demos for matchmaking and most of the other stuff in the free package. Also read: https://doc.photonengine.com/en/pun/current/tutorials/matchmaking-and-lobby
  • Hitting the home button triggers a callback in Unity. The others notice this by monitoring if a client is replying to messages (some messages explicitly require an ACK and if that’s missing for a while, the client times out).
  • The server can handle many more but split up into many rooms. Per room, a bunch of 2 to maybe 16 or 30 players can interact, usually.