Question about LAN

Please excuse my lack of knowledge of game networking, but I had a question about a game I'm working on that would be on a LAN. It will have max 7 people on it at a time and my manager sounds like he wants P2P for the back end of this game. I've been trying to comprehend all of this from documents, etc. so I apologize if this question is answer in the docs. I was wondering if PhotonNetwork can have one of the clients be the MasterServer or kind of mimic a P2P system. We don't want a standalone server, but rather the first person starting as the master server. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I can do this with Photon Network, right? I've just been trying to imitate the demo for the plugin and figure all of this out!

Comments

  • Photon has no P2P, its always a central server architecture.

    This means that the messaging is always through the photon server at least and if you use the Unity Photon Networking then its commonly through Photon to the master client and back again.
  • So this means that a computer will always have to be running photon server or start it up before playing the game?
  • Yes.
    Thats normally your server machine then, but if its within a non internet connected environment, then someone will have to startup the photon server, because thats where everyone will connect to, nobody connects to the others directly
  • Thank you very much. I will have to implement P2P instead and use Photon Network for another time.
  • LizzyCTS wrote:
    Thank you very much. I will have to implement P2P instead and use Photon Network for another time.

    Look at the Lidgren library in this case if its for lan.
    if its for something else, then better use photon or something with a really working master server etc not unitys inbuilt networking
  • I think ExitGames are planning to put some sort of server-service online, so that might solve your issue. In such a setup, you'd simply use ExitGame's server.

    However, if you're really in a LAN, I don't think this would be the best solution because your local clients have to go over a remote Photon server to connect to the (also local) MasterClient, so that would introduce quite a bit of unnecessary lag.