Photon Networking (Unity Asset Store)

Hi there, I've recently downloaded and started to use the Photon Networking that is packaged and free to download in the Unity Asset Store. It's absolutely amazing. Easy to use and works great.

Here's the question: Is it possible to use this as a server for an MMO game?

I know photon is suppose to be able to be used as an MMO server, The problem I see though is.. With so many players connected to a server, wouldn't a mass amount of players all receiving other player data start bottle necking and just not work? How do you go about setting something like this up.

I've logged in about 10 clients into 1 server, with a couple friends logging in about 5 on their PCs. after so many were connected... It all went out of sync and was taking a very long time for some clients to catch up to others. How can this be prevented and can this package even be used as an mmo back-end?



*When I say MMO I actually mean around an avg. of 100 connections in one area.


Thanks!
-Eddy

Comments

  • For an MMO you would use the normal photon SDK and the MMOExample with interest management.
    that also ensures that you don't trash flood the networking through missuse of RPCs and unrealistic send rates (anything beyond 25-30 is worlds beyond MMO usable)
  • Hm, Yeah. I know the RPC send rate would have to be very low, Thats easily done. Not quite sure how to use the regular Photon SDK though. If it is the same as it was about 4 months ago... I went digging through the examples and demos and the only thing I could accomplish was me becoming frustrated and scratching my head! Heh. It was very confusing at the time and I had no idea how I was to get a "server-side" instance of the game up and running for a collision and object refference.


    The Package in the asset store solved that with the Master Client though.

    Reasonalby, What would be do-able number of players in a server that is well-coded with the Photon Networking (Asset store version)? Thanks.


    -Eddy
  • 50, perhaps 100 players in the world if you have the $200+ to pay for a correspondingly tiered server if you are lucky as the scope handling does not work if I recall right.

    Photon Unity Networking is targeted at temporal session games and alike with limited amount of peoples, not at a persistent world with many persons and AI etc. For example doing a shooter and having dedicated servers as master clients would one of the prime examples of its use


    And yes the regular SDK is pretty beefy to get in.
    But for an MMO thats really the smallest problem, without it and without the men months of programming work to go anywhere, you can create an O Game, but neither an MO but definitely no MMO ... Not even a Persistent Online Game is reasonably possible out of my view cause that again requires that you change the server side code to handle the db there, you don't want to handle it in the simulation clients as the calls would reduce its performance thus reducing its use again.
  • Ah alright, Thanks for the info. Looks like I'm aiming at a small networked game then! :P.