ReadyMatch, dead simple multiplayer matchmaking!

[KenFox]

Now available in the Unity Asset Store.

http://u3d.as/content/field-kist/ready-match/2wB



The Angry Bots Multiplayer file used in the tutorial can be downloaded here.


Introduction to ReadyMatch
ReadyMatch is the fastest, easiest way to add multiplayer matchmaking to Unity games on ‐ or across ‐ any platform. Join your players instantly to open matches, connecting up to N players to a designated host.


Be up and running in a matter of minutes. No complex UI to design ‐ just drop in a "Play Now" button and you're done!


ReadyMatch sits on top of the built-in Unity networking components. In one "Play Now" step, ReadyMatch detects the network configuration of the client and connects to the first available game that matches the player.s network configuration.


To make ReadyMatch integration easy to understand, we have built a multi-player version of the free Unity game AngryBots. You can download it from here.



Please post questions, support issues, feature requests, or anything else related to this thread.

[tomoprime]

Sounds interesting. Hi Ken. Are you affiliated with GameSpy ? I didn't know they offered hosting services.

[KenFox]

Hi Tomo,

Yes, fieldkit is a new brand of lightweight, focused network services from GameSpy Technology.

We do a lot of hosting on a lot of games across a lot of products.

ReadyMatch, the first of our fieldkit line is also fully hosted.

Thanks,

- Ken

[tomoprime]

Ok that's great! Two things.

Where can I find more information on GameSpy's Hosting services?

For some reason I am unable to watch your video youtube videos in full screen. I'm using Safari on Lion.

[KenFox]

Check out poweredbygamespy.com for a full rundown of our services.

As far as fullscreen goes, that seems to be a limitation of the embedded player. If you hit the link along the top of the player when it's paused you'll go the video on YouTube's page where you can go fullscreen.

Thanks,

- Ken

[tomoprime]

Thanks for the link.

As far as fullscreen goes, that seems to be a limitation of the embedded player. If you hit the link along the top of the player when it's paused you'll go the video on YouTube's page where you can go fullscreen.

Yeah it's in youtube not embedded player. I think it's a local problem with my version of safari. Firefox doesn't seem to have the issue...

[Seon]

Hi Ken,

So this is a fully automated service without the ability to show "suggested" games to join rather than just throwing people in?

If there an ability to set the filtering / matching options? e.g., by region only, or by ping times only, or via a custom value like by player fame or rank etc ?

Cheers :-)

[KenFox]

Hi Seon,

The idea behind ReadyMatch is a really simple "play now" type functionality. You can set min/max players and timeout length.

If you are looking to do something more involved with matchmaking, you might want to check out poweredbygamespy.com/

Thanks,

- Ken

[tomoprime]

Ken I signed up but I'm getting an error in the dashboard that says https://developer.poweredbygamespy.com/game/create is unavailable when trying to create a game instance.

UPDATE
A work around to "Add New Game" is to switch the https url to non ssl e.g:
http://developer.poweredbygamespy.com/game/create

[KenFox]

Sorry to hear that, I'll ask our DevSupport guys to reach out to you and make sure you can get a game created.

[GST_Spiff]

The "Add New Game" feature has been fixed. Actually, it was fixed yesterday -- it broke for a few minutes while our devs were making some updates to our developer site.

Note: You do not need to "Add" a new game to kick the tires on GameSpy Technology code or services. Once you've created a free account, you can download the SDKs or our Unity-focused C# wrappers, read our documentation or post in the forums. You only need to create a game on our backend when you're ready to start integrating into your title and need backend identifiers + service from us.

Also, I just want to clarify something really quick re: hosting -- here, we're referring to the hosting of the matchmaking backend -- the persistent infrastructure that you need to manage matchmaking for online multiplayer games. I mention this for two reasons:

1) developers occasionally conflate this with the hosting of dedicated game servers (which we do not provide)

2) many online service-oriented products available in the Asset Store DO NOT provide hosting of this infrastructure ... they give you code, which you must deploy to servers in your own datacenter, and then manage yourself. That's a "hidden cost" ... we take care of that for you.

Hope that helps!

[tomoprime]

Hi I had registered a game and downloaded both SDKs. I noticed as noted in docs that Mac wasn't supported in the C# wrappers. People may notice a DLL not found error when trying to run the Unity examples on Mac.

My question is when will Mac be supported? Many Unity developers do there work on the Mac platform. This seems to throw a big wrench for a bunch of us for trying out GameSpy's beta services.

Second question: do you know if Mac is supported if I write my own C# plugins from the C SDK? I would suppose not if GameSpy didn't already provide this in the Unity Alpha release. Or did they run out of time as it's a limited api wrapper and we can implement it for ourselves?

[GST_Spiff]

At this point, I think you might be best served posting your questions over in the GameSpy Technology developer forums:
http://developer.poweredbygamespy.com/forum

That's the best place to ask about our core product line, including everything supported by the C# wrappers. Our engineers read and respond to posts in those forums pretty rapidly.

We really appreciate the interest, but we'd like to keep this thread in the Unity forums focused on the ReadyMatch product (so that people who want to use it don't come here and get sidetracked by a bunch of back 'n' forth re: the C# wrappers and our full SDK suite).

[tomoprime]

Ok np. Is ReadyMatch supported on Mac then?

[KenFox]

ReadyMatch does work on Mac.

Thanks,

- Ken

[AzraelKans]

Ok. Ive got a lot of questions, you mentioned the game on your sample already had networking, so that means this only works with unity networking? can other network engine (like photon) be used?

Also in the video you started playing with someone in your office by compiling the game with the kit, thats good for testing, but how does a regular player log in in the matchmaking service? you just start creating rooms until you ran out of connections in the server? or are users creating servers on the fly?

The video looks really choppy, do you have a game demo we can use to test the speed of the actual gameplay?

Can you store any data of the players ? I've heard gamespy has a great service for saving player information and leaderboards.

[jhohenstein]

That means this only works with unity networking? can other network engine (like photon) be used?

The client side implementation is definitely written to work with Unity networking. For example, it uses the detected NAT using Unity Networking and matches clients according to NAT compatibility.

The server side implementation does not have that restriction. The service is a pure REST implementation. If you are interested, we can provide documentation on the service for use with other networking implementations.

Also in the video you started playing with someone in your office by compiling the game with the kit, thats good for testing, but how does a regular player log in in the matchmaking service? you just start creating rooms until you ran out of connections in the server? or are users creating servers on the fly?

There is no "logging into the matchmaking service".

From an authentication perspective, that application authenticates with the service using the registered application token and receives a relatively long lived authorization token. Sessions are identified by the IP and port of the client.

This service is intended to provide "Play Now" functionality with limited search capabilities. The steps are:

1) Client determines NAT parameters.
2) Client receives service authorization.
3) Client searches for available sessions
4) If no sessions are found and client is able, client registers a session.
5) Client either connects to a server or acts as a server. Play begins.

Can you store any data of the players ? I've heard gamespy has a great service for saving player information and leaderboards.

In addition to the simplified scenario that ReadyMatch is designed to support, GameSpy has a full-suite of online features including structured and unstructured cloud storage (e.g. saving player information), matchmaking, stats, leaderboards. A newly developed C# native client wrapper for these services is coming online soon.

[timesking]

Is it work with iOS and Android?

[St.Yes]

This looks great. Which consoles (if any) is this supported on?

[ALIAKBAR11]

HI,, I am AKI, from singapore,
i would like to know to make multiplayer game such as Angrybots Multiplayer,?
i have a project with my professor to make a multiplayer game in android,
i hope some body can help us,,,
thanks a lot,,
regards
AKI,,