Server side with PHP and Webservices

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I like to create my serverside code with PHP and user web services to talk to it. Knowing very little about the way Unity does its client server operation, is this a practical thing to do?

tomcat

2

Yupp practical and pretty simple :slight_smile:

The WWW and WWWForm classes are best friends of you in this case.

3

Great. Just had a look at the runtime classes and I think I get it. Can see a perl example but not a php one.

  1. Have you seen any php server side example, so I can figure out what to do at that end?

  2. BTW, does it mean that I can do my own server and not using the unity’s client/server model?

tomcat

4

  1. do not fully understand, sorry. On PHP its $_POST[“your variable name”] and whatever you send to the page and back

  2. No, WWW / WWWForm is HTTP communication
    For realtime games you either have to use unitys networking or integrate a 3rd party solution or work with .NET Sockets

5

Ok, so for low bandwidth and casual communication WWW is good, but if I have many users (I am going to have about 100), I have to use unity’s networking which is raknet.

Do I have to pay to use raknet? or is there a free version?

tomcat

6

No not exactly.
The WWW is only usable for web communication or very low frequency turn based games handled by a CGI / PHP end (basically a Unity version of a browser game)

Anything thats more realtime requires unity networking or a 3rd party networking.

The networking integrated into the unity clients can be used for free.

7

Ok, so I can create a game supporting about 100 users (running unity clients) which can talk to a single server running on a remote site. This wouldn’t cost me anything.

If I want to support more users, then I have to use something else like raknet which would then cost me. Is this right?

tomcat

8

Yes and no
There is no Unity Server
Only the client which you would use as server if you want to run something like a dedicated server.
That would be free yes.

But you can not run that on a remote website. You need to have a (virtual) dedicated Windows / OSX Server
You can not run realtime game servers on webhosts

(already browser game type server loads are commonly not allowed on webhosts)

9

Yes, I see. I got to get a co-located server where I can run my own server software or host it at home.

I guess I have to run it on a webplayer and develop my own server using WWW to exchange data between client and the server.

I guess there is no chance of creating a simple world shared between clients as the comms overhead makes it slow to update the world!!

tomcat