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

Building a PubNub interface


Our system will make use of the built-in WWW class of Unity to make requests, and a very useful Unity script feature known as coroutines to asynchronously wait until the request is finished—since a web request can take a while to complete, we do not want our game loop to be paused while waiting for the server to respond.

Tip

In Unity, a coroutine is a way to semi-asynchronously execute some code by dividing the function into steps which can be performed across multiple frames. Coroutines "yield" values during execution. This value is interpreted by Unity and used to determine when to resume the coroutine. For instance, yielding null will cause Unity to pause our function and resume it on the next frame. In this case, we can yield a WWW object, which will cause Unity to pause our function and resume it once the WWW request has finished (the WWW request itself is handled asynchronously in the background).

First, we'll create a MonoBehaviour class to accomplish this...