Standalone Client Matchmaking / Peer to Peer Multiplayer

Multiplayer & Networking
1

Hi unity community,

My basic idea is to have a Launcher with basic update functionallity, shop, statistics and matchmaking.

My problem is I don’t know how I would implement it. It’s sort of a MOBA game so my actual Unity game would only be 1 scene right? I could imagine that I have to start the process and give some startup arguments. Like an array of properties.

[host] = “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”
[username] = “name”
[team] = “team_X”
[character] = “swordsman”
etc…

but is this possible?

The second problem is I would like it to be a peer to peer game. So 1 of the players is assigned as the host. (All sort of ping/latency tests and choosing the best host is done in the client). First of all is this Peer to Peer approach easy to use in Unity (no portforwarding/NAT/Firewall problems) or do I have to build dedecated servers?

2

The way I did it in my old prototype (really, very old, in old networking system, and I was new to Unity too), was to code out-of-engine launcher and auth server using just .NET. Then launcher would save the data it got from the launcher to a temp file, and game would load it on startup, and then delete the file.
However, that was a mess. It worked, but a mess. Unsure if there’s anything better though. If there is and someone has an idea, I’d also like to hear.