Photon feature set

Quietus
edited January 2010 in Photon Server
Greetings,

Is there a document which lists the full feature set of photon? There seems to be scant information that would interest a developer on the website. Can't find a link to any documentation for example. If I go to the Detailed Product Information page I receive nothing more than marketing fluff. Fast! Reliable! Easy to Use!

Thebeef.jpg

Obviously it includes a socket server. Is there more to it? What differentiates Photon from a package like Lidgren? From the website, other than easy integration with your managed services it's impossible for me to tell.

p.s. First!

Comments

  • They have documentation, but it is kind of buried in the example projects:
    http://photon.exitgames.com/Download/Photon/

    I downloaded the Unity Client SDK and there is some documentation in there:
    neutron-dotnet_v5-6-1.pdf

    Section 4 starting on page 101 describes Photon in programmer terms.

    The best documentation I have found for the server side so far is in the Photon Server SDK download:
    doc/Photon-Server-SDK.doc

    Investigating the source code itself is also an option since they give sample projects that compile and run right out of the box. But it is a time commitment.
  • Quietus, welcome and thanks for the first post. Great pic!

    You are right, the page is more or less marketing and a very high level overview. The documentation is in the respective SDKs and we have a page "Developer Network", which is more or less still aiming Neutron customers. We'll have to work on the intermediate level information.

    "Obviously it includes a socket server. Is there more to it?"
    Yes. It's a framework for multiplayer games. The basic server logic, called "Lite" application, provides remote procedure calls (our "operations"), rooms with player lists, event forwarding and a temporary value memory (we call those Properties). This part is written in C# and you get the source. This makes it easy and fast to implement your own RPC

    "What differentiates Photon from a package like Lidgren?"
    Lidgren is a level lower. It solves data transfer over UDP but does not provide a server optimized for massive amounts of concurrent players and neither hosts your logic in a pre-defined framework.

    We will have to work on the pages...
  • Tobias wrote:
    "What differentiates Photon from a package like Lidgren?"
    Lidgren is a level lower. It solves data transfer over UDP but does not provide a server optimized for massive amounts of concurrent players and neither hosts your logic in a pre-defined framework.

    Aaahhh - this sounds good ;-) ... I had been looking at Lidgren, Photon and Project Darkstar (for some reason SmartFoxServer never really attracted my attention). Project Darkstar seems very overkill for my needs and I really wouldn't want to mix Java and C# (been there, done that, got a T-Shirt) ... so Lidgren and Photon were left. "Optimized for massive amounts of concurrent players" and "hosts your logic in a pre-defined framework" sounds like the kind of technology worth the time needed to learn it and invest some porting efforts ... and the pricing is also within reasonable reach (I also appreciate the upgrade-paths since I'll probably start with low-numbers and then scale-up as needed).

    Finally, I really like the approach of using C++ for the "dirty stuff that needs to be super-optimized" and having .NET / C# for the logic that I deal with. This feels like Unity to me ;-)