Collision detection in server side and Unity?

Skumtron

I'm wondering whats the best method for setting up a simple 3D collision detection server side?

I have a small-ish game world terrain where I'd like to make some areas unwalkable. After reading about it on the forums, it seems as Photon, by default, doesn't support any collision detection on the server side. Are there any additional libraries I could use? Any other ideas?

Tobias

Actually, this topic is not as simple as it looks but certainly possible to solve.
It depends a bit on how much effort you want to invest.

You could run Unity on the server side and have each room start and use a Unity instance. This has a lot of overhead and requires a Unity license to run it in Headless mode.

Usually, you want to avoid as much work on the server side as possible. So a fully fledged 3d engine and physics is not the best choice when you actually only need collision detection.

You could write a simplified collision detection implementation. It should be able to read and use a simplified representation of the world, which you export from Unity. You can tweak the simplicity of that engine to your needs and in best case run it in client and server.

Sorry for the relative high-level info but as said: It's complicated and depends on your game's needs.