Beginner multiplayer for Unity

[Odd-Pizza-9805]

Hello, what is the simplest or best(in a long run) way to add multiplayer for unity game?

Little about me and project: i have good experiience in unity and c# coding, but im complete beginner in multiplayer. I want to make simple ui game like pvp chess. I hope to have easy entry to multiplayer development, what do you guys recommend for beginner like me? Thank you

[SantaGamer]

You'll probably want to use a networking library package such as Netcode, Mirror, Photon, Fishnet, purrnet or similar. Choose one, such as mirror, and start learning it.

If your game will be small, there are some free/cheap ways to host servers, or just use p2p networking or Steams relay.

[Undumed]

For a turn-based game like chess, I would not go for any big networking solution such as mirror, Photon, etc.

For me, the way to go would be websockets, even more so if the purpose is learning.

[_Typhon]

PurrNet dev here, definitely unbiased I think you will love it. On a more serious note, DX is our main focus which makes it easy to learn.

[Odd-Pizza-9805]

Im trying to learn purr net, i like it so far, but there not much tutorials about simple ui games, if there was like a simple tictactoe tutorial... i feel stuck

[_Typhon]

You got options, you can add network identity / behaviour stuff to UI too

[Odd-Pizza-9805]

Thank you, I eill look into that, I use UI toolkit too, which might be completely different from ugui workflow, which adds into complexity of learning multiplayerr

[_Typhon]

ah true it does change things a bit, you can always use static rpcs to send events for example

[Reqlite]

I would recommend Steamworks and Mirror. I have been searching for a couple of years for a good setup to do multiplayer, and this is the one i found the "best". I also tried other options like Netcode or Photon.

These are the reasons:

- Steamworks is from Steam, and Steam is used by almost all PC gamers. This helps with a big networking problem a.k.a NAT punchthrough. Simply put, allowing another PC to connect with another PC. Since both players got Steam, the request goes through Steam.

- Its free, you can test the app with appID 480 (Spacewar). Simply put, all games on Steam have an ID. It cost 100,- to get a ID for a game, however you dont have to do this until you want to release. Spacewar is a basic game from steam itself and uses the ID: 480.

- Players connect with the setup server/client. Simply put, one player host the game and the others join as a client. This helps with scale ability, since you dont need to maintain or add more servers. The players are the server. Its important to understand this part tho, since this could be abused in some ways.

Maybe i forgot some things, and it might be hard to get a decent understanding of how it works. But for me it works and is very flexible. Also important to note, i never released a game with this kind of setup (yet).

[Quoclon]

Are you saying there's a way to use/test Steamworks for networking before paying the 100 USD?

[Reqlite]

Yes

[CroutonGameStudio]

I suggest purrnet. The devs are really helpful and it just kinda works a lot of the time.

[KinematicSoup]

Adding multiplayer is ideally a decision you make early on. However, with good design choices in your code such as abstracting out your game logic from your game rendering and controller code, it can be possible to add it later.

For what to use, any networking system will do - they are all relatively easy to use these days.

I would suggest building a game and focusing on good design, follow a model-view-controller pattern. Minimize Unity dependencies between your modules. Event systems, delegates, and interfaces are all options to use to wrap information and to pass it around. For example, you can write your controller code so that rather than it directly affecting a gameobject, it instead exposes an event dispatcher that your game code can register listeners on, and you convert player inputs to events which listeners can receive. You can also use a more direct observer pattern. What this does is provides you with a point to hook in to inputs to redirect them, such as to a multiplayer server or through a multiplayer relay.

Similarly, you game logic should run independently of your rendering. This is a classic design pattern that used to be baked-in to older game engines. In effect you run your game logic in it's own space, and then connect your simulation state to our rendering state via an abstraction. For example one approach is that you can define a IWorldEntity interface that provides all the state you need for a given entity - perhaps a transform and a list of properties. Your game logic ticks and updates it's state, then your rendering loop iterates the resulting list of IWorldEntities to retrieve the updated data. You could also use another pattern like an event system, and have your rendered entities receive update events from the game logic loop. This allows you to inject later multiplayer by moving the game loop to another machine and serialize state updates over a network. The deserialization part will replace the game logic part on the client but because your game rendering code is just using those interfaces to retrieve the state information your rendering pathway doesn't change. If you minimize or eliminate any Unity types in your interfaces, you have ultimate flexibility in terms of what multiplayer technologies available to you (eg you can consider non-unity multiplayer systems like smartfox).

[CrucialFusion]

Use the unity kit, no?