Last week I started studying about creating a multiplayer game over the network. In the very beginning I was not focused in how to do it exclusively in Unity but how to create a networked game in general. Rapidly I was overwhelmed with the amount of problems to be solved in order to accomplish this. For simple games that don’t need realtime interactions between players its not so hard but for action games that require lots of players interacting with each others in a 30 frames per second basis (or more) we need to care about the amount and speed of data been exchanged through the network, how to guarantee data integrity and synchronization between the players, how to protect the game from smart cheaters, how to overcome network specific problems (like NAT punchthrough) in order to connect the game players, how to assure that the AI of NPCs will behave exactly the same in all instances of the game client, etc. Its indeed a very complicated problem.
Well, after get myself pretty bogged in the low levels mud and have a good grasp of the problems that arise when creating online multiplayer games, and unless Blizzard hire me to develop a new reliable, secure and performatic network protocol to solve problems of millions of simultaneous players in their games, I decided to stick to the highest levels and enjoy the currently available existing solutions to all these problems.
My plan is to first study and implement a simple game in Unity using its own built-in networking solutions, then evolve to the Photon Networking Framework that is almost ubiquitous in the Unity community as the standard solution to create professional online multiplayer games in this platform and has an tasty indie free plan.
So until the next post!