Some local networking questions

Unity Engine
1

I’m doing some stuff for trade shows and can’t rely on the wifi…they get so bombarded by the amount of traffic in the confined space and it’s not reliable.

I need to network a couple computers and a couple phones as controllers.

I’ve been using photon cloud, but can’t use an internet connection, so have been thinking about installing it on a local computer and setting up a basic LAN.

For the phone to computer connection I’m thinking bluetooth…

Does that sound right? The other thought on the phones is to use wifi locally, but I worry about connectivity of it in the environment. So I keep coming back to bluetooth.

Anyone have an idea of the range of bluetooth connections between a phone being used as a controller and the computer running the networked game.

Is bluetooth the best option in this situation, and can one computer handle 2 bluetooth connections with 2 usb bloothooth dongles? Or 2 computers, each with 1 client is probably better…?

2

Heya! Me again hehe - I’m a bit of a fan of networking so I thought I’d share some advice here too :stuck_out_tongue:

It all depends if you actually require internet or not. Using phones sounds like a little bit much, as Operating systems like Windows/Mac support something called ‘internet connection sharing’ or ICS for short which allows the computer with that active to act basically like a router, without strictly requiring an internet connection. So, a simple approach is activate that on one of the computers, sharing e.g. Wifi to LAN, attach a switch to that computer (just using it’s LAN port), and then attach all other computers to the switch. Even if the Wifi link goes down, your mini LAN will still be up and running.

If you require internet, you could get a cellular dongle and share that from the main host computer as that would be about as reliable as it gets; in this case you’d share the dongle’s internet to the LAN rather than the Wifi :slight_smile: