Unity Free and Built-in Networking...Doable for this game?

Multiplayer & Networking
1

So basically I’m making a Town building game (Like Farmville I guess?) with some RTS components such as unit selection, movement with pathfinding and attacking. There won’t be massive armies or anything, just a main hero character and 3 or 4 accompanying units, along with the town’s buildings per player.

The game is basically a persistent world. Each world will consist of up to 40 or so towns (players). The initial phase will probably have 2 or 3 worlds tops, thus up to 120 concurrent players. The DB will be handled by MySQL via PHP.

Now I’ve started working with Unity Networking for my project and it seems to get the job done. But I have some concerns and questions regarding the built-in solution:

1- I will be hosting the game through a VPS/Dedicated server. Since Unity Networking doesn’t support setting up a dedicated server, can I say create a special renderless webplayer build for the server and initiate the server through it? Players will connect directly to the Server IP which is static.

2- How is the performance of the built-in Networking and how scalable it is if I decided to add more worlds? Am I better off using a different solution such as Photon? At the moment and if I get the hosting ordeal resolved, the built-in solution looks to be sufficient and easy enough, but one need to look ahead.

Appreciate any input, thanks.

2
  1. You need a dedicated machine which has access to a proper graphics card to run Unity as a hosted server
  2. For this project, they way you described it the feeling I get is that the Unity Networking would be a very poor fit and something more akin to Photon or SmartFox might work better, or just plain HTTP and PHP on the back end depending on how much traffic you have.
3

Cheers, looks like I’ll be giving Photon a shot since it seems to be highly recommended in here.

You mentioned it can be done through HTTP and PHP, I’m curious about that since I’m a PHP developer by trade. Can you elaborate just a little more on that?

4

I am not sure this is what you are looking for, but you can set the game to start automated as server, build it in that way, copy the build on the server machine and simple launch it; in semi-renderless mode (or even renderless mode but I did no tests on that) you can run the game using xvfb under Linux. This way is working very well for me, and Unity build-in networking system looks enough. But maybe I don’t understand what mean a dedicated game server.