Book Image

Unity Multiplayer Games

By : Alan R. Stagner
Book Image

Unity Multiplayer Games

By: Alan R. Stagner

Overview of this book

Unity is a game development engine that is fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows used to create interactive 3D content. Multiplayer games have long been a staple of video games, and online multiplayer games have seen an explosion in popularity in recent years. Unity provides a unique platform for independent developers to create the most in-demand multiplayer experiences, from relaxing social MMOs to adrenaline-pumping competitive shooters. A practical guide to writing a variety of online multiplayer games with the Unity game engine, using a multitude of networking middleware from player-hosted games to standalone dedicated servers to cloud multiplayer technology. You can create a wide variety of online games with the Unity 4 as well as Unity 3 Engine. You will learn all the skills needed to make any multiplayer game you can think of using this practical guide. We break down complex multiplayer games into basic components, for different kinds of games, whether they be large multi-user environments or small 8-player action games. You will get started by learning networking technologies for a variety of situations with a Pong game, and also host a game server and learn to connect to it.Then, we will show you how to structure your game logic to work in a multiplayer environment. We will cover how to implement client-side game logic for player-hosted games and server-side game logic for MMO-style games, as well as how to deal with network latency, unreliability, and security. You will then gain an understanding of the Photon Server while creating a star collector game; and later, the Player.IO by creating a multiplayer RTS prototype game. You will also learn using PubNub with Unity by creating a chatbox application. Unity Multiplayer Games will help you learn how to use the most popular networking middleware available for Unity, from peer-oriented setups to dedicated server technology.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Unity Multiplayer Games
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Rigidbody simulation


If you read through this chapter, you may notice we do not cover rigid bodies.

There's a reason for this. At the moment, Unity's built-in physics do not support manually stepping physics. Manually stepping the simulation is crucial for both client-side prediction, as well as server-side logic. Since we can't accurately step rigid bodies, we can't perform client-side prediction on them.

However, if your game relies on Rigid body simulation (for instance, if players are in control of vehicles), and you require client-side prediction, one possible solution is to integrate a third-party physics engine. This will require some work, but will give you the most control over how the world is stepped, when, and so on. There are a wide variety of free and opensource third-party physics engines written in .NET, such as the Jitter physics engine, or Henge3D. Many of these were designed for use with Microsoft's XNA toolkit, but some are framework-agnostic.

Again, integrating a third...