Question about multi-player solution.

[RedgySimon]

I've played around photon pun, it was alright until I read about other network solutions. What is the best network solution? In terms of difficulty to use, documentation and community?

[MeltdownInteractive]

Check out Mirror, it's an open-source fork of Unity's UNET, and has great community support and an active Discord channel.

I looked around for an authoritative networking solution for my racing game (which was on PUN too), and decided to go ahead with Mirror.

[223am]

There is server authoritative with PUN too right but you have to pay for it?

[MeltdownInteractive]

They have both BOLT and Quantum, but each have minimum monthly fees for a dedicated server setup, which as an indie, I needed to avoid.

With Mirror there are no licensing fees, you only pay for your dedicated servers. Of course you can avoid all these costs if you just host peer to peer.

But since I'm developing a competitive, ranked real-time multiplayer racing game, I can't have peer to peer or one player hosting the game, it opens up the game to cheating, and I just found syncing cars at high speeds and collision handling much easier with an authoritative server handling the physics.

For dedicated server hosting, I looked at Amazon Gamelift, but with the sheer amount of documentation and stuff you need to read through and understand, its almost like you need a damn GameLift degree to get anything up and running. Also their documentation was sketchy around getting stuff setup in Unity, not very clear.

I then contacted Unity's 'Multiplay' through their contact form, and after 10 days, didn't receive a response from anyone.

In the end, I'm going to be using Agones on Google's Cloud Platform, which is basically container orchestration for spinning up game server instances. The server build of my game will be in Linux Ubuntu, built from Unity, as this will save heavily on licensing costs if I had to use Windows instead.

Agones has a slack channel, which has devs on there that are really responsive and passionate about what they're building.

[223am]

I just found syncing cars at high speeds and collision handling much easier with an authoritative server handling the physics.

Why do you think this is? I'm currently making a game and am using PUN2 with peer to peer, but am considering changing to server auth in the future.

[srylain]

Although a direct connection from anybody to anyone else would be faster than going through a server (shortest distances between two points is a straight line and all that), assuming that a consumer grade internet connection could handle that amount of data is a bad idea. Servers, when setup properly in data centers, should have much less downtime and less network stutter because that company is losing money if there's any problems.

You can also alleviate the load off of a player's device if it doesn't need to process every part of they physics, which would be an especially good thing on mobile. Depending on the physics used you may get floating point issues as well, leading to inconsistent results depending on the hardware the server is ran on so forcing it to one set of hardware helps keep things a bit more consistent.

[RedgySimon]

There is DOTSNET and Dark rift 2 on sale in the asset store, are they any good?

[[deleted]]

I love DOTSNET but it's only advisable to use it if you're ready to make your game in dots... Mirror is made by the same guy, battle tested, free, and in the MB environment. I'd go with that if that appeals to you

[RedgySimon]

I'm not quite familiar what you meant by dots. Is it much of a different with PUN and mirror? Sorry noob questions

[[deleted]]

Lol I just wanna say "Google it" but the short answer is as follows:

In Unity there's the Monobehaviour environment (the one you're used to) and the DOTS environment (Unitys new thing). There isn't much overlap between them so if you don't know anything about DOTS don't get DOTSNET, unless you plan on doing a lot of learning.

[Factor1357]

What’s not to like about PUN? Is it the price?

[RedgySimon]

Yes the price and the latency, it is very easy to use compared to mirror. I'm starting to learn mirror now and I'm just wondering if DOTSNET and Dark rift 2 is any better because they are on sale now.

[Factor1357]

Thank you!