I have a single player first third person game I created where I go around and shoot enemies in one large city. My friends kid wants to play the game with me and I have no idea how to add in networking. This got me thinking that if I am going to learn networking, I might as well make it so more then just 2 people can play.
can someone give me some information on what type of networking I should use for say 8 to 12 players max on a single server. Because I would like to make a server and client so that I can just give the client to my friends, but not give them everything. Id rather they connected to a main server to play.
I am very willing to read all the information you can give me, helping me choose what type of networking would suffice for my needs, and i know absolutely nothing about networking, did I mention that before?
This game was made entirely from Unity Obviously, and if anyone cares to see what I have, please send me a message, I will gladly show you once I get this networking done, so it might be a while, lol
I would not recommend Photon, rather go with the Built in unity networking, it has a lot less overhead (edit: in terms of how hard it is to learn, etc. not actual overhead when running code, etc.)
I disagree. I was able to get Photon up and running in 2 hours. It cleanly allows you to tell any object to do functions remotely, locally, or both. Also there is a Slew of great examples that can be downloaded for free in the Asset store or on their site at Exit Games. Rogue UnderWorld was Multiplayer on the first day I decided to build it.
For new game developers Photon is a Great way to start out !!!
I wouldn’t recommend either Photon or Unity’s Built in Networking… For me personally Photon was very hard to grasp. Granted I tried to learn it when it was still fairly new and didn’t have much in the way of documentation but still. Photon also has no idea about your world geometry So alot of things would need to be done Client side which would allow for hacking.
Unity’s Built in implementation of RakNet also isn’t that great. It’s limited to just 64 connections. Now for your stated intentions that would be more then enough. However let’s say your game became widely popular and you wanted to expand it even more to 100 or 150 players on a server. Using Unity’s built in networking you wouldn’t be able to.
I would recommend going with uLink. It’s a very powerful networking engine built based on Unity’s Networking but isn’t limited to 64 connections. It’s easy to grasp and quick to setup with plenty of examples. It uses a Unity headless server so Unity Pro is required if you wanted to host it on a dedicated Windows or Linux Server.
the game was first intended to be a survival game and trying to outlast the attack that was happening in the city. i pretty much stopped at just having 1 set of AI that didn’t respawn and i would just clear out the city and be done. After some thought last night about my friends son wanting to play and the possibility that he might talk about it with friends of his, I am going to want to make some changes to the gameplay as I re-write it with networking in mind.
I still think that adding too many players would be a mistake as i want it to be a city setting still, i want to allow player-vs-player. and a bigger city and few people actually playing would break free of it just becoming a huge arena style game play and actually allow each person to just do the objective.
If you are wondering why I chose to go the PvP route, well I know everyone has it in them to want to kill other people, and the game infact is about killing other people(AI) so why couldn’t they harm one another as well on accident if they tried to team up?
Anyway I am not going to get to far ahead of myself here. Simple put the game is single player at the moment and really all I need is a simple networking script to help me get 1 other person to join me first. then add a way for 2 more and so forth till I have a desired amount.
I would still claim that going with the default unity networking will be easier for you, the photon architecture forces you to deal with things you don’t even have to consider when using the unity architecture. For example that photon runs outside of Unity, so how do you deal with authority? “Master Client”? Simulate it on the server anyway? No sorry, Photon is good for a lot, but for someone who is just starting out with networking it is not the right choice.
I hear what you are saying and I think you have a great point. Someone else suggested that using photon cloud would save me on having to host a server. but i think that if i can make a good server client from unity networking for now, maybe i can change later if i feel i need something it doesn’t offer. I’m only looking to play it with friends right now anyhow, not looking to give it out to others, who would want to play a generic game anyhow. lol