Is Bolt production ready? What about documentation?

I couldn't find anything about Bolt's current state, people usually say stuff like "best networking solution ever", or "worst thing since Exit Games bought it" - I don't really want to decide based on "reviews" like that. Yes-yes, I know it was used in The Forest, but are there other released games as well? I'm using Forge Networking at the moment and I'm pretty damn tired of the documentation(it's incomplete, outdated, or both), I spent the last couple of days to read everything I could found about Bolt, the documentation seems short, but if it's enough to get it up and running I'm fine with that - is it? To be more precise, with Forge I read the wiki, watched a tutorial, and turned out both was outdated(without mentioning this in any way), and a random guy helped me on Slack - should I expect something like this with Bolt as well?

Also I'm not sure if it would be suitable for my game at all - I'm working on a physics based puzzle game(ouch - but it's turn based, so not so bad), I need the ability to change who calculates physics on the fly(based on the documentation this wouldn't be a problem, but physics usually mess everything up, what should I expect?).

PS: I don't want to compare it to Forge in a "which networking solution is better" kind of way, more like a "do I have to beg for help by other devs to do basic stuff, or after a decent amount of reading I can get stuff done by myself".

Thanks in advance!

Best Answers

Answers

  • Thanks, it seems promising so far.
    But.. are there released games with it besides The Forest? To be honest that game isn't really popular because of its networking capabilities, I would be more interested in completely multiplayer focused titles - I'm mainly asking because I don't want to spend time on something which isn't battle-tested.
  • Pecek said:

    Thanks, it seems promising so far.
    But.. are there released games with it besides The Forest? To be honest that game isn't really popular because of its networking capabilities, I would be more interested in completely multiplayer focused titles - I'm mainly asking because I don't want to spend time on something which isn't battle-tested.

    https://www.photonengine.com/en/Bolt/Showcase#allPlatforms-allGenres-Bolt
  • Thanks, I was hoping to see more games, but that's a start. I'll give it a shot, thanks again guys!
  • I've used Bolt in my MP-only title, which has about 90k owners, and has definitely seen it's fair share of stress testing. When I released on EA, it was a day after Fholm released Zeus, he was extremely helpful in getting stuff fixed very quickly back then, and (as expected) there were plenty of bugs. Some of these bugs have been fixed. Since Fholm stopped dev early last year, Bolt development has effectively halted completely, with a few insignificant, minor patches, most of which have broken one thing or another as well.

    Bolt is only production ready if you don't use the features which *aren't* production ready, if that makes any sense. You will run into issues with Zeus, you will run into issues with performance in large games, my game currently has an issue where initializing Bolt or connecting to Zeus will sometimes cause a critical 20-second hang. This has of course been reported in github, with no effective action taken.

    Long story short, no, it's not 100% production ready, there's also no released fully-auth Bolt game (that's actually been stress tested) either. If Exit Games paid fholm whatever his astronomical freelance rates are, and just said "Go into Jabbr for 7 days, 8 hours a day, talk to the people there that actually have a game that they're going to release about what's wrong, fix the github issues, and finish off Bolt" then I would have no hesitation calling Bolt the best networking system for any engine right now. Unfortunately, that won't happen.


    I have the EXACT same problem with the application hanging for 10-20 seconds upon starting bolt. Tried everything I can think of to fix it.
  • @GoGoGadget Thanks for the extensive answer! May I ask which features are buggy other than Zeus? Performance probably won't be an issue in my case(1-8 players), but the 20s hanging sounds pretty scary. I already bought it and started porting my Forge code so it won't make a difference in this regards(as I really don't have any other choice, Unet is still pretty new, I don't want to waste time with it until the bugs are ironed out, Photon's latency is anything but good, and Forge, well, I already wrote my problems with it), but still would like to know which features should I avoid. :)
  • Pecek said:

    @GoGoGadget Thanks for the extensive answer! May I ask which features are buggy other than Zeus? Performance probably won't be an issue in my case(1-8 players), but the 20s hanging sounds pretty scary. I already bought it and started porting my Forge code so it won't make a difference in this regards(as I really don't have any other choice, Unet is still pretty new, I don't want to waste time with it until the bugs are ironed out, Photon's latency is anything but good, and Forge, well, I already wrote my problems with it), but still would like to know which features should I avoid. :)

    Entity events don't work at all, Mecanim sync performs terribly in some cases, Frozen entities never get proxied to 'late-joiners', and I would bet you anything that all the auth stuff has a bunch of issues with it in production (no proper games have been released with it), although I've never touched that. Also, updating Bolt is still a convoluted process that can cause loss of references if you don't do it right. Those are the showstoppers, and at current development pace they will never be fixed.
  • @GoGoGadget: We checked your bug reports and asked for repro cases (quite a while ago). Without being able to reproduce the issues, we can't really help any further.

    @Lee7: Please report the issue with steps to reproduce it. In best case, use the issue tracker:
    https://github.com/BoltEngine/bolt/issues
    Or, at least, post a new thread with detailed info what's wrong in your case.

    @Pecek: Bolt is not error-free and that's neither a secret, nor do we ignore it. This is why it's still labelled "beta".
    We think it's a good solution with good ideas and we want to develop it into the great tool it could be.
    There is already a number of games that work perfectly fine with Bolt, but honestly I can't say if it will work for you. To give this some scope: I can't even guarantee that you will be able to finish your game in Unity, for that matter. You might need some feature that's not there or broken. Or maybe you don't agree with their ideas and begin to hate it.

    I know it's a mayor pain in the ass to lose time on networking (no one likes that). If there was one solution for all, we would all use that, but that's not the case.

    Let us know if you try Bolt. If you have questions, you're invited to ask.