What is the group parameter of PhotonNetwork.Instantiate

jz87

I was reading through the demo code and there was no comments or documentation on what the group parameter of PhotonNetwork.Instantiate does. Can someone explain?

Tobias

It's a kind of interest management. Views belong to groups and you can choose to ignore certain groups.

This feature is implemented client-side only, so it won't save you bandwidth and instead dispose already received messages before they are executed (if they belong to a group that's not tracked by a client).

We will implement this better including documentation.

jz87

Is there any feature like this that could be server side to save bandwidth? So if I have a large map, and a lot of players, I might want to either not send the update data of distant players or I might want to send only a subset of data. So for example, I might only want to send the position information once every second for distance units whereas I might want position and rotation updates 5 times a second for units that are on screen.

dreamora

at the time time only if you target RPCs explicitely, with syncing not at all unless you implement it yourself

Tobias

So far, we don't have grouping or interest management in the Photon Unity Networking solution.
We think that groups like in Unity might help as first step and would implement them alike. Not limited to 32 but also not "managed" automatically by distance or something. However, that could be added.

It's good to know your usecase(s) beforehand, so we could cover them.

gnoblin

Unreliable rpc sending and channel support would be good built-in features to have

I understand how to use rpc targeting - but what can be done about sync optimization?

thanks,
Slav

dreamora

thats where the Scope function would normally trigger in, its 'view sync' only within unity

Tobias

v1.4 is now submitted to the asset store and it's (client side only) grouping should be fixed.

"Real" grouping and scoping are on our list but did not get the attention they need yet.
We won't be able to get to this before the end of this year, it seems.