Using free webhoster to store data?

Questions & Answers
1

Hey,

I’ve made a 2D platformer with a level editor for custom levels (saving the levels as xml files). Now I want to allow the player to share his custom levels with everyone else. I want to host my game on different sites like gamejolt, newgrounds, kongregate etc. Some of them offer a database to store the users levels but this comes with some problems:

  • Some sites like newgrounds don’t have an api for unity yet
  • Every site uses different databases (gamejolt can store strings, kongregate just numbers etc.).
  • And the most important: The savestates wouldn’t be available from every site. I want the player to share his levels independent from the site he is playing on.

Cause of this I wanted to store the levels on a independent server but I can’t afford a paid one. Therefore I made an account on 000webhost.com. Now I just have one question left: How can I access the server to store the xml files? I need to save files and also browse through existing files to load a level.

Can anyone tell me how I can access the server from unity? I know 000webhost offers ftp to upload files but as far as I know Unity doesn’t support ftp anymore, right? Can I write an html page which can be accessed from unity and does the save/load process on the server?

If there is already an answer on this it would be nice if you could tell me the link. My searches were without helpful results…

2

For sending the .xml files, you want to use Unity’s WWWForm class:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/WWWForm.html

The Unity’s example found on that page will also explain, that you’ll want to have a server-side script (in this case, written with Perl) to handle the file saving on the server-side.

In your case however, you’d want to use PHP (since 000webhost.com supports PHP, not Perl).
For PHP file uploading, there is a tutorial here:
http://www.tizag.com/phpT/fileupload.php

To recap, use WWWForm to send the files and PHP to receive them to the server.