MMO for Android/iOS

Glib

I am looking into developing a MMO game in Unity3D using Photon as its multiplayer framwork for mobile devices. My question is, is photon networking infrastructure efficient enough for mobile devices? Is it resources intensive? Of course, I will have to do the best on my end to optimize all tasks so I don't create that problem myself. But, is this even possible? Is it a good idea to create a game that relies so much on the network for a mobile device?

dreamora

Yes it is efficient enough. With MMOs the major limitations is nearly never the networking but the rendering itself, especially on mobiles.

Glib

Do you think it would be much more efficient to have the MMO constructed of different rooms rather than just one big scene?

dreamora

If you don't have the engineering expertise to create a high end rendering engine (a la wow or cry) or the 6 figure budget to license one, then yes definitely.

one big scene is in unity no option on mobile anyway as there is no proper streaming. lightmaps, light probes, path finding data, occlusion culling etc can't be streamed at all actually

Tobias

If your game is able to do rooms, this is likely much simpler to create. However, rooms have (soft, floating) limit of how many players can send their updates to everyone else in the room. So they need to be small and sharded maybe.

Doing interest management for a open world game is not easy. Problems you don't see right away pop up mid-implementation, like "what do i do on borders of my grid?".