Toubleshooting Network Discovery (on Android)

Unity Engine
1

Hi there,

I wanted to implement Network Discovery via UDP broadcasting for my game.
I have a game server that is running on my computer and a client that runs on an Android smartphone. I am using the Unity “Network Manager” and “Network Discovery” components.

Everything runs fine when run from the PC, but on the smartphone it doesn’t seem to receive the broadcast message.

I know that it should work in principle, because I have played games using this exact setup that also use UDP broadcasting. How do I troubleshoot this? Thank you very much!

Greetings,
Pfaeff

2

Any ideas?

3

Maybe an obvious question, but have you checked so your phone is on the same network as the PC?
Can they connect using the IP-numbers?

4

Yes, they are on the same network. I played “Eon Altar”, which also seems to use UDP Broadcast and that works fine.

5

Have you verified that you have Network Discovery working between two PC’s, with one on your wifi that your android device is using?

6

I just tried running the server on a virtual machine on the same network, since I currently have no second Windows machine. I then ran the client on the host machine and I am having the same issue there.

7

Could it be some firewall blocking the network discovery packets, are there a Windows, or antivirus firewall running on the PC?

8

It seems to work when I turn off the Windows firewall. Shouldn’t it be enough to allow the game to use the network when it first starts up?

EDIT: now it even works with the firewall turned on. What is going on?

9

Not sure if it´s a Unity error, but I would recommend filing a bug report on this.
Se if it can be reproduced on other machines.

  1. Open game on PC, allow network connections → no network discovery
  2. Disable Windows Firewall, enable it again → network discovery working.

Check if it has to be done on both the server-PC, and the client-PC, or just one of them.