I see people usually post Photon or SmarFox. Just curious of why Badumna is not mentioned? It seems to be the only one that has dead reckoning that I can tell. I can see where the peer to peer option could be scary, but it does have a centralized option as well. Or are most making webkinz, farmville, type games where the dead reckoning isn’t that important?
Word: price
The MMO option is definitely costly. Not totally sure what you get out of that instead of the on time purchase. The others do have a better free option. Looks like they just bumped both up to free 100 CCUs?
But for purchasing I see:
Badumna: $200 - 500 CCU
SmartFox 2X: $750 - 500 CCU
Photon: $450 -500 CCU
Looks like Exit Games pulled the Neutron option which seemd to have more multiplayer features.
Adding ElectroServer to the list.
There is no 500 CCU option at the moment, but I think one is being added.
$1,000 - 1,000 CCU, from that you can probably get in the ballpark of what the 500 CCU price would be
Didn’t mean to neglect that product, from what I can tell it seems more 2.5D room based? Totally love the EUP logic if could be done 3D, but guessing far out of my budget since no price is listed.
Leathel,
EUP and ElectroServer are different products, as you probably gathered. Just a quick description:
ElectroServer - high-concurrency socket server used to build pretty much any kind of mulitplayer application that you want.
EUP - A virtual world platform, that uses ElectroServer underneath. EUP has built-in features to help support most features that you find in virtual worlds or other large-scale games. For example, there is a questing system built in that is based on World of Warcraft’s system (so it if really flexible).
You’re right, EUP has a higher price tag because it is geared toward saving a team of developers many months of work.
You asked about it being 2.5D and room based. EUP uses 3D coordinates. When used with Flash most companies have mapped that into an isometric (2.5D) view, because that works well with the Flash platform. It isn’t room-based. EUP supports massive spaces and uses sphere-tree culling to manage who can see each other as they move about.
Anyway, I just wanted to give some information there to differentiate what the two products do.
ElectroServer is not the cheapest one and yes Badumna changed it’s price after we complained about it in another thread not so long ago. Mind that they have a problem in webplayers still since U3, i think they are talking to UT to get it working.
What is their webplayer problem? They have no unlimited license option, so see a problem with those that want that flexibility.
The problem of badmuna on the webplayer is that it can’t work in the way it advertises as you have no peer to peer option available through sockets at all, so its “use users to feed other users” does not work, it totally falls back to the “all through server” model → SFS, Photon, ElectroServer alike
Gotcha. That isn’t a total killer. Would be nice to offload non-critical npcs, but other than that, most logic I’d want server-side anyways. SmartFox looks to have some extrapolation coming up, so that is good to see. I was told Torque uses a combination of Interpolation and Extrapolation, any clue if true? My current Torque project’s dead reckoning is pretty solid, just looking for best web-based multiplayer options now.
Good to cya again dreamora(RC days).
Torque uses several things including an own simplified network physics simulation, going up there requires some solid work to compete, its networking isn’t one of the 3 most acclaimed network technologies in game history just for the fun of it 
(normally number 2 after quake, if the hl one is above or below is discussable, but clear is that neither of the two ever powered 256 player games on 56k :))
Hi Leathel,
Yes, the Indie licenses available for a one-time fee have the full functionality of the Pro licenses, so if you meet the Indie criteria (<$200K revenue, <5 staff/contractors) this is a great option. It’s also worth noting that these prices are per-game, not per-server.
Badumna currently supports Unity 3.0 standalone and the 2.6 webplayer. We are working with UT on the 3.0 webplayer support and expect to have an update on this in about 2 weeks.
Thanks
The Scalify Team
That is a good point. I can currently seperate my zones by core or by server for expandability. While none of the options seem to have that granular capability, Badumna seems to have more clustering option with its Seed Peers if I understand the technology correctly.
I would suggest looking into removing the Indie 5000 limit and go Unlimited to compete with the rest. Might be why people don’t consider it as an otion. Speaking of it though, while I don’t know Unity, I know Torque and guessing server resources should be similar, and having Unlimited on a per server basis would be pretty useless. Even 1000 users all on one server would max out my quad core cpus.
@dreamora,
Ok. Got me there 
Still, as long as the characters aren’t rubberbanding all over, I’d be happy.
The reason many likely don’t consider it an option is that it costs you more for an MMO lifetime than just licensing and paying Hero Cloud.
Might be that badumna after half a decade to a decade plays out cheaper but the 6 figure saved on developing a solid proofen backend, tools and client due to Hero Cloud and the “fast to market” aspect definitely are valid points that reasonable developers just have to weight against at very least $240k (thats the highest license we know which isn’t unlimited) for 4 years of lifetime.
You can do the math of what you need userwise especially when you use microtransaction to come out in the “win” are while paying a team of artists, programmers and support staff in parallel etc.
None the less I’m all in agreeing that it is an interesting approach that for corresponding games can make a serious difference, especially if you are in the indie range and it helps solving some problems many indie teams can never eve solve themself (-> and thus basically are required to get HeroCloud or BW Indie)
If the Badumna per month option is their non-Indy offering, then agree, pricing is an issue. I am not close to non-Indy any time soon so haven’t really looked at it. For a client-side, MMO, agree can get the Hero Engine, the game scripts, server hosting, payment process, all done for a yearly cost cheaper than some of their montly costs. BigWorld would actually be my choice if going to a client side app. $299/year for 25 seat license is a quite a deal. No RPG logic is a killer but still workable since python based. Possible Web implementation coming with them, so still keeping my eye on that as well.
I find myself bringing this up repeatedly, but how do you plan to have server-side NPCs and such when Badumna/Photon/whatever cannot interface with Unity’s collision, physics, or geometry in any way without some serious custom programming? I assume people have already considered and have a solution in mind for this before even discussing what server they should use. If so, what is it?
The fact that it includes some dead reckoning code is really a very minor feature, certainly one of the smallest hurdles you’re going to face with any kind of game that intends to have server-side game logic or an authoritative approach. Extrapolation/interpolation is ridiculously easy compared to the rest of the issues that you’re going to run into, as are the licensing costs of any of these networking libraries.
The only way you can make use of Badumna’s “peer to peer” networking in Unity is if you are 100% comfortable with trusting the data sent from an easily modifiable .NET client. Hint: you shouldn’t be.
in badumna that part is actually the easiest situation of all due to the various things it has. For this specific purpose its the trusted clients: You host trusted unity headless clients on your cluster that act as verification nodes.
Hmm, then in that case it becomes more interesting. I understand the idea of trusted clients, but it sounded like Badumna was using it to mean something else entirely. It would be interesting to see what impact this has on the networking, and if forcing all traffic through these trusted clients was any better than simply sitting some trusted Unity clients on a network run under Photon/Electroserver/whatever.
Badumna is suppose to have server-side or client-side NPC options already built in.
NPC + Client = no option if they have any state relevance
We don’t want cheaters to decide about persistent world state.
Thats like handing Bin Laden USAs or Russias red Nuke button, asking him not to push it.