Multiplayer for free

[midnight pagoda]

First of all, am I in the right place to ask my question? I've finished creating a small game and would now like to try to integrate multiplayer (it shouldn't have a lot of players, 100 at most). Which tools directly integrated with Unity can be used for free?

[mint sequoia]

you are making a big mistake

do you want your "small game" to be networked? or this is a new project

[midnight pagoda]

Yes, it's a new project. The development started 1month ago, I just want to explore the "multiplayer side" 😂

[mint sequoia]

100 players is too many

netcode for gameObjects recommended maxAmount is 8 players only

you could try explore Mirror, Fishnet, Photon Fusion, Netick

[midnight pagoda]

In total?

[midnight pagoda]

I will check this

[mint sequoia]

based on my theory Fusion > Netick > Mirror > Fishnet > NGO

[mint sequoia]

yep (its bad)

[midnight pagoda]

After all, I'd rather do that than having to host my servers at home 😂

[river rivet]

Unity has some game services with some free tiers you can try. You can find a list here: https://unity.com/solutions/multiplayer#explore-multiplayer-products-and-services--2

If you want to make a peer-to-peer game, you can look at the Lobby and Relay services.
If you want to use game servers, look at Game Server Hosting and Matchmaker.

[round vector]

Hello @midnight pagoda . Are those 100 players who will play together in the same match/session? Or just people playing the game.

NGO is indeed recommended for small-scale games; however, if your game has 100 players, but each room has 4. NGO might be a good choice.

If you still think the limit might be a challenge, look at Netcode for Entities (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.netcode@1.0/manual/index.html). Keep in mind that the game's architecture might need to adapt as it is based on the DOTS-ECS stack.

As for your hosting, matchmaking, comms needs. I suggest you look at @river rivet 's link.

[midnight pagoda]

Hi, first 100 is my objective of players, but maybe there will be only 10, idk. The only thing is that not all the players will play together. They will play in rooms (Like room of Player) or by hazard creating a match maker

[midnight pagoda]

I'll check this

[round vector]

@midnight pagoda in that case, I suggest using the number of PCCU to determine which hosting service(s) to use and the # of players in a room to choose your net code stack.

Good luck!

[midnight pagoda]

Ty

[broken ore]

? what r u on

[mint sequoia]

he was implying to create the first multiplayer game with 100 players

but the message wasnt it.

he was meaning 100 players accross seperated rooms

[broken ore]

yeah 100 clients? so?

[mint sequoia]

a huge deal for anybody just jump into network programming

[dusty quartz]

@midnight pagoda
There is no hard limitation of NGO and maximum number of connected clients. Really, the best guide to determining your project's boundaries (when using NGO) is to try and determine the maximum number of spawned objects (i.e.NetworkObjects) your project requires and then narrow down the list by determining how many of those spawned objects will generate messages at regular intervals.

As an example:
You could have 100 in-scene placed doors in a level that never move and use a NetworkVariable to determine whether they are opened, opening, closing, or closed. These types of NetworkObjects are low bandwidth and processing cost objects and you shouldn't be too concerned about them. Of course, to optimize the doors you could have 1 parent NetworkObject and 100 child GameObjects with a "NetworkDoorState" component (derived from NetworkBehaviour) which would help reduce the cost of initially synchronizing all of the doors when players join a session.

You then would have things like player objects, projectiles (possibly), and any other object that could generate network messages on a regular basis. These are the NetworkObject instances (active objects) you would be most interested in to determine if NGO is the right solution for you.

Once you have your list of active objects, you then would need to think about what are your targeted platforms? For the most part, with desktop and console related platforms I would try to keep you maximum active object count in the 500-700 range (you can optimize bandwidth consumption for transform synchronization using half float precision and quaternion synchronization with quaternion compression enabled). With mobile platforms I would cut that number in half (250-350) for higher end mobile platforms and then once again (125-225) for lower end 3G range devices.

Hopefully this additional information will help you in your decision making process.

[simple grove]

^ this is good info, if you decide not to use unity's NGO system your only next choice should be Photon Fusion.. and look at the "Asteroid Simple Host" sample. The other question is if you want co-op where the host/game creator can disconnect but the game continues on (host migration). Not sure if NGO/Unity currently supports that but Photon does.