Connecting to GPU Server

Ivan_Morales

Hello. I've been using a GPU Server to upload unity levels and allow people to enter separately to explore them. This is intended for architecture visualizations. The process is simple, I just upload a unity PC build to the server and then people can access it. Recently I was asked to do the same but for several users at once.
Being new to photon and the concepts it involves, I wonder if it is possible to keep doing the same process I've been doing, uploading just one build to the server, but then, allowing several people to access it using photon?

JohnTube

Hi @Ivan_Morales,

Thank you for choosing Photon!

The process is simple, I just upload a unity PC build to the server and then people can access it.

May I know how? and what do you mean by "access it" exactly? How does a client connect to this "server instance"?

I wonder if it is possible to keep doing the same process I've been doing, uploading just one build to the server, but then, allowing several people to access it using photon?

I think this is possible using:

- Bolt's Headless Server model
- or you could go for Photon Server Plugins approach but the tricky part is to have your Unity-based architecture visualizations there and probably you will need self-hosting a Photon Server on the same GPU machine.

Ivan_Morales

Thanks for the answer John.
I'm not an expert explaining this kind of things, because my knowledge is superficial, but I can share you an example of one of the models I've uploaded to the GPU server:
https://www.mondriam.com/cloud3d
This is the GPU server's page:
https://www.furioos.com/

Please give me your opinion of Photon applied to that GPU environment
Thanks,
Ivan

JohnTube

Hi @Ivan_Morales,

So what you are doing is streaming the application which is running on a server from the web browser and sending user input only.
I see that furious.com is using Unreal Engine 4, WebRTC and UDP only.
But not sure if multiple "viewers" in the same "world" or "3D space" is allowed out-of-the-box.
Photon has an Unreal Engine SDK but not sure if it can be imported w/ furious.
Maybe @Kaiserludi have a better idea.

Also not sure Photon is suitable for this use case.

EDIT: I overlooked the Unity mention in the OP and the Unity logo on furioos.com website. Thanks @Kaiserludi for clarifying this. It should be obvious that @Ivan_Morales is speaking in Unity's context as this is the right category for it: PUN and it is explicitly mentioned in the OP.

Kaiserludi

Hi @Ivan_Morales.

Photon is used to let multiple instances of your app transfer realtime data between each other.
It does not matter to Photon if the Clients are running on the users local device or on some Cloud hosting platform. If your run multiple instances on a Cloud hosting platform, then those can still communicate with each other through Photon, just as if you would run two instances on the devices of two different users.
However if your intention is to stream the graphics from just one instance running on a Cloud platform to multiple different user devices and accept input from those device in the same instance of your app, then that would be a task for the streaming platform and hence you would have to ask furioos.com if they support such a use case. Photon would not be involved in this at all. My guess is that they don't support it as AFAIK the usual approach would be to run one instance per user device.

Ivan_Morales

Thanks a lot @Kaiserludi & @JohnTube for your inputs. I asked the people in Furioos about it and they said they were working on it at the moment (4 weeks ago). The thing is that I wanted to be sure from the "experts" that my assumption about the flow of information was correct and that the "gate keepers" are the people in Furioos in this use-case scenario.
So I'll have to wait then....

Anyway thanks a lot for the help.