Im looking to take my first crack at building a multiplayer game in unity, and I seem to be hitting the scene at an awkward moment, so looking to poll from the community on steering me in a decent direction.
I see UNet is deprecated and no longer supported, which is fine, but I don’t seem to see any documentation on the new Multiplayer service yet either? The docs still reference the high level api that’s apparently going away or something. Not sure, it’s been weird and confusing.
GameSparks was very highly recommended across various google searches and support threads… but apparently as of Feb 2019, the “Real Time” part of the SDK has been locked away under the Enterprise pricing tier (and it looks like not even the people who pay $300/mo for the standard even get services that extend beyond Leaderboards and user management and turn-based stuff)
Is PUN still a thing? I remember looking into Photon ages ago but it’s hard to tell where it sits among the unity community these days
I’m building a FPS jam game and do need real-time support for that, matchmaking would be cool too. But because it’s a jam game I just dont have the time-availability to write a networking layer from scratch. I went with GameSparks at first only to stumble across the Enterprise limitation just now and I’m just kinda freaking out about this haha
Thanks! After writing that post I flocked all over Photon, and see it’s got a bunch of options like PUN, BOLT, and Quantum. Seems Bolt is more geared towards Shooters which is what im looking for, but whats the different between that an regular PUN 2?
Using the recommendations I went with Bolt, the website was very clear that it was targeted towards shooters and making that the best experience.
But then I ran into an issue I wasn’t immediately aware of: it doesn’t support WebGL. Downloaded clients have been a huge roadblock for previous projects and I intended to have this project embedded in a browser as a design goal. Sadly, Bolt is incompatible and indeed throws exceptions. An issue I wrote to the forum for: https://forum.photonengine.com/discussion/comment/44793
The user there on the forum suggests to instead use PUN 2, and as I write this, that’s currently where I’m at.
The only point of confusion now for me is that the docs seem to focus on PUN 2.0, as opposed to the changes since then as Im using PUN 2.9, https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/pun/v2/demos-and-tutorials/pun-basics-tutorial/lobby and the classes aren’t quite lining up anymore, and with 2018.2 removing some UNet classes that the tutorial relies upon, and heck even the library insists on using, I’m in a predicament again it seems
Oh. Yes, support for WebGL is not currently possible with Bolt, I’m sorry.
The docs for PUN 2 are meant as manual and for all 2.x versions.
We don’t update them with every single release. Most of the time, the “point” releases add stuff (which we add to the docs) and fix problems. So overall, the doc pages for 2.x should be OK.
The reference doc for the API is in the source and compiled into the .pdf/.chm, which are both part of the package.
There must be some mixup, as PUN 2 does not rely in any way on Unet and our docs don’t point to any of that. PUN 2 is fully compatible with Unity up to 2018.3 (we didn’t test the newest Betas or Alphas recently).
Can you let us know what’s wrong with the basics tutorial without too much effort? We’re going to fix that, of course.
I have seen nothing but amazing support from Photon?
And while you don’t get CCU limits… That’s because you don’t get the same feature set. You are really comparing apples and oranges. If you want to run dedicated servers or do all the NAT Punchthrough and messaging relaying yourself, go with something like Mirror, Forge or even MLAPI (written by me).
I would say that you will get an about equal amount of support from all the active libs.
There is a reason why people pay for Photon. It’s good at what it does, but it’s not for everyone.