Architecture using Photon Server for a .io style game (casual arcade MMO)

Hello Photon Hivemind,

We're dipping our toes into the MMO water and thinking of using Photon for the server side of some .io style games. Thinking Agar.io or Slither.io but with very different mechanics and goals. One concept needs to handle up to say 100 people or so on the same server or more if possible. Another concept involves having the server run a 2D physics engine as well but handling say only 20 players at once.

My initial research seems to indicate that basically the Photon Server product is the correct way to go since we would probably want to do an authoritative server model with some client side prediction. The only product that *seems* to let you write your own server code seems to be Photon Server. Photon Unity Network only seems to handle the case where one of the clients effectively becomes the server and everyone else talks to that person... is that understanding correct?

One downside of Photon seems to be that we'd have to run on AWS or some other service/our own hardware, and I'd rather have all of the backend handled entirely by Photon rather than having to maintain servers ourselves.

Most of the articles for making an MMO on photon point at the Photon server, so I think I'll start there unless there's some feedback here to the contrary.

If anyone has any tips, references or links they could share on choosing the right pieces of Photon. Some experts here could probably save us a bunch of time.

Thanks,
C

Comments

  • PUN is at client side, it always need a server or cloud to work.
    You should use Photon Server to handle some logic at server side.

    Another option is photon cloud + custom extend with webhook
  • Another option for server side logic are Plugins. Please note, that those are only available for Enterprise Clouds or self-hosting.

    Besides that, it strongly depends on your game, if you can go the client-only route or not.
  • Hi guys, thanks for the tips. It looks like indeed Photon server Plugins are the way to go for us. We would actually like to use the Enterprise Cloud if possible as we've run our own servers before, but we'd rather avoid it if possible. Is there a way to develop on the Enterprise cloud version without paying a large monthly fee? In any case we'll be downloading and looking at the docs.
  • You can either develop using a local Photon server or order an Enterprise cloud. Get back at developer@photonengine.com for a quote.