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Overall, Photon is great and I would recommend it for anyone who wants to understand more about how networked games work. Photon also has several different products and versions, and it can get confusing which documentation is for what product and version, as names and APIs are similar.
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A lot you can do “out of the box” but everything is there to get as advanced as you want.Individual pieces of the API and systems are well documented online.
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#Unity networkview how code#
In some ways, the examples and associated source code were more useful to me than the actual documentation. They provide great example projects and source code.Some impressions I had from working with Photon on this project: Photon, like Unity, offers some very good "out of the box" solutions for getting basic things working, but it also offers advanced options and systems for making full-fledged, server-based games. There are two versions of PUN out there, so make sure that when you're installing things and looking for documentation that you're working with PUN version 2. You can read more about the basics here:Ī game that has a very advanced server model is World of Tanks, and some interesting articles have been written about its server architecture:Īfter poking around and reading online, I settled on using Photon for Unity Networking (PUN). For a bunch of reasons (cheat prevention, ability to roll back or replay events, precision in competitive play) peer-to-peer is mostly obsolete in action games. That's my simple explanation of a topic that can get very complex. Peer-to-peer sends data between two or more machines and each player is responsible for running the game and responding to incoming data about where other players are and the state of the world. The players are clients that render what the server tells them is going on in the game. Client-server (or server authoritative) runs the game or simulation on a server and that is where the authoritative state of all objects in the game world reside. There are basically two kinds of server setups for multiplayer games. Here are a couple good tutorials on basic two-player/multi-player networking: Great recent blog post about networking solutions:.Here is a good summary of the situation with "native" Unity networking and a write-up on the available other solutions: Also check to make sure that you're using demos or references written in the last couple of years, as things go out of date fairly quickly. Most of the tutorials and demos out there were built using UNET, which essentially has been retired. It's important to check what networking system a demo is built on.
#Unity networkview how free#
While the one below isn't free ($30), it is a very solid tutorial/example not just on networking but on a lot of aspects of game design: Many of the tank game demos and tutorials out there are out of date or a bit simplistic, but there are a couple exceptions. And most importantly, even something simple, when done well, offers a lot of opportunity for craft and learning. Reading this post, someone might say, "Dude, there are a gazillion Unity tank game demos out there, what is the point of doing another one?" My answer comes back to the "built, not bought" approach and having some personal goals for my game projects: Standalone executable (not just running in the editor), an actual game loop that can be played repeatedly without exiting and restarting, and something that has gameplay to it and not just a demo of a basic mechanic or system. Lastly, there are dozens if not hundreds of online tutorials and books available covering all kinds of projects and games in Unity, including tank games. ( Here's a post about a VR project I did in Unity using the HTC Vive and Steam VR.) The Asset Store also has many, many demos and systems of various sizes and complexities that can be downloaded and tinkered with or used as examples.
#Unity networkview how professional#
The cool thing about Unity in my view is that it's easy to get something basic up and working quickly (and sometimes without needing to do any real coding), but there is no limit to how advanced a project can get, all the way to shipping a complete professional game for console, PC, mobile and VR.
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