[NO CCU LIMIT] Forge Networking now OPEN SOURCE

Hey guys,

I spent a few months working with Photon only to find out that it generates so much "garbage collection" per unit/character, that I was getting massive frame drops (I am designing an RTS game). So each player could have about 200 units each in my game, all possibly having to update positions about 10 times per second. I believe the GC spikes were because of the way Photon creates/generates arrays to send the information over the internet. I'm not a networking expert though so I'm not sure. And as we all know, Unity's garbage collection is terrible right now.

So, my question is, if I use Forge Networking, will I be able to somehow avoid garbage collection issues (for instance by either having the ability to design the networking structure to avoid GC spikes, or to get closer to the "bare metal" so-to-speak so as to somehow avoid it as well)?

Thanks for any info.

 

Thank you, Brent!

 

hi guys,

is there anyone here can help me how to make simple Login Username & Password?
If possible Load all Players data from server back to client?

I did found some videos about ARPC (AuthorativeRPC) but it doesn't seem working to me...

Anyone here can help me please?

 

Best way to be efficient in networking is not to use Bolt or Forge at all. Use Unity Unet - built in core network functionality. It works fast it works anywhere since it is a part of Unity. I don't understand why people use some other custom networking not from Unity? It is like to invent some custom wheel while there are already a car made for you

 

from what i've heard Unity NET is limited to certain number of connections and can't handle larger client realtime connections, at least its what i think why i need Forge Networking

 

You can change connection limit. I use 100 connections without any problems. I do not understand why everybody hate brand new network solution from Unity? In Unity 5.3 it works just perfect and simple. It is a part of Unity core, just take a look at tutorials - https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/multiplayer-networking

Do you really think that some custom networking can work better than build in Unity core?
Think again

 

its not a matter of better, its a matter of easier

same as Language, do you think C# better than UnityScript?
Then why people use C# the most rather than UnityScript which is made by Unity itself? In fact, UnityScript is obsolete not use in anywhere anymore.

People don't care which one is better, its just which one you can understand the most then u will use it, at least that's what i think

 

anyone can help me with this please?

 

If you don't care about efficiency you can use whatever you understand . But if you do, you should use best tools available. I trust to Unity guys a lot more than to Bolt or Forge creators. Unet is free and it works just perfect. It gives you everything you need to build multiplayer game and even more

 

Only reason I had to quit using Unet (this was about 3-4 months ago or more), was because I kept getting auto-disconnected (I assume by Unity themselves for going over some sort of limit). And this was with about 1-3 units in my game (not very many at all). So I could not test anything, or even figure out what was causing me to go over their self-imposed limit. It was very frustrating, and impossible to develop if you keep getting auto-disconnected.

I assume it has changed since then? I'm going to look at using Unet again, now that they have their system more together now.

Also, Unet's services are looking to be very expensive compared to other solutions (like Photon). As well as the documentation I doubt is even remotely that good yet, even now.

But, I might also look at Forge as well, if I can't get Unet to work properly again.

 

This isn't a thread to discuss UNET, you probably are best using your time somewhere else. Second UNET does things it's own way and we do ours another, you have full source code and you are able to take advantage of algorithms built by us and our community that optimizes network traffic and allows for more dynamic communication with sockets not built for Unity (eg, MySQL).

Yes, UNET does have a CCU limit from what I hear, you will not be able to go beyond this limit without paying or striking a deal with Unity. Their model is similar to Photon, where we are open and you are free to host as much CCU as your servers can handle

You probably should double check your sources, UNET and Forge launched basically the same exact day and our solution was actually sought out by many people who use UNET because UNET was just not functional. Of course by now they have moved into a more stable release finally . Again, Forge is far more extensible than UNET will be, especially due to it being locked down to CCU since they want to push their cloud hosting platform to compete with Photon.

Thank you for the kind words We will continue to extend the system to support as many possibilities as possible! Also it is worth noting that we don't have many complaints at all about performance. If we did, there is something new in the works right now that will wipe that complaint out

Awesome! If it works for you go ahead and use it. Preaching on our forum thread about UNET will get you nowhere in life. Please take these messages to a different forum thread, especially since you planed on coming into this thread to do nothing but say things that you can not back. It is worth noting that we have had users with over 1000 network objects (equivalent to players) on a single server. Maybe you should try it out sometime if you would like to get past your CCU cap

Awesome, let us know your findings, we are always looking to improve the system! Also, be sure to watch our news for some of the bigger announcements that we will be doing very soon

 

Hi there,

Often a username and password are stored in a RESTful service that you host or someone else hosts that you connect connect with via REST requests or an API that does them. This is mainly because the server (Forge in this case) mainly runs off of runtime cache rather than storing and reading files (though this is completely possible to do). The main reason that you have an alternative service do this is because you don't want to slow down your main server to do database lookups and transactional queries.

If you absolutely want to have your game server store the usernames and passwords for your users to sign in with, I would suggest looking into the cache system we have along with some System.IO tutorials for reading and writing files. Basically a client should send either an RPC or a WriteCustom command to the server containing the username/password entered and the server should validate and respond with a success/fail. It is also important to look up standard encryption for passwords and how you would like to store them.

Fully answering this question would take quite a bit to explain, so I can tell you a good place to start is actually with looking up RESTful API structure and developing something like that. Then from Forge you can use our HTTP library or something from the asset store to do a web request (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to the server and handle registration and login transactions through that portal (advisably with HTTPS) .

Please let me know if this helps

 

I just mark my opinion about networking in Unity. Forge networking is related to this aspect of programming. Since you use C# - you use virtual machine and garbage collection. As a result your system can not be reliable and efficient in a long term intensive run. This is the result of not being a part of Unity core

Please correct me if I am wrong, but your system also has limited possibilities in using Unity core functionality. The result is that maybe you have some kind of traffic optimization better than Unet, but your system based on slow C# language, while Unet uses native C++ code that is a lot faster and efficient.

Unet also lets users host they own servers without any cloud service, but cloud here ready if you need it. As I see Forge does not have any cloud functionality at all. Moreover Forge tutorials out of date and it still has bugs with RPC. So, as I see - the best way is to go with Unet than spend time learning other custom networking solution. Just my opinion

 

Please don't spam this thread with opinions. I will report you if it continues, thank you.

Please send us an email with your implementation so that we can find the bug or help you fix your code to properly use the RPC . We are not aware of any RPC issues, we have hundreds of active developers on Forge, I'm sure it would have came up to us recently (as some have) but if you check the changelog we have resolved any issues that have been brought up to us.

If anyone has any similar questions please post on our reddit so we can publicly answer or send an email to support@beardedmangames.com . We would be happy to help!

 

No problem! Let us know if you have any other questions

 

Announcement!

Websockets alpha is out on the site, it will take a few days to get through the Asset Store process, so feel free to download it from the site and start to mess with it. Of course this is an alpha so I wouldn't port your main game over to it yet. However, do know that any code you use for your current implementation will be working with this version of websockets. Please report any bugs that you may find to us and we will create a ticket for them!

Secret sidenote
We have been hard at work on the newest thing for Forge Networking, and as stated before in
@Cranick's message, it will be free to those who own Forge! I can say that there are some great new things coming regarding bug fixes, security, and extensibility. Not to mention tons of performance increases!

 

With the major RPC bug fixed and the developers very active once again, I am forced by the quality of the product to once again endorse it & refer others to it for all their networking needs.

I just wanted to remark that Forge is overwhelmingly the only good choice for networking solutions, even with any flaws it has or used to have. UNET in particular is significantly worse. These are some of the amazing features you get with Forge, that no other solution gives you.

• Full Source Code (Don't let people fool you either. UNET is NOT open source. That's an outright lie. Forge is the ONLY asset of the major ones that gives you the source code.)
• No CCU Limit, No Messaging Costs - Just Pay Once, Free Forever (Including feature updates - it just keeps getting awesome)
• MUCH Quicker updates (While I can't speak for third party asset developers, I know from years of experience that Unity is especially slow with updates. Even at its slowest, active third party developers are still significantly faster than Unity.)
• Github Access (Get the updates, before the updates! Commit changes to the project to improve it.)
• Responsive Developers (Even at their worst, third party asset developers are significantly more responsive than Unity. I can't speak for other third party developers.)
• Doesn't Require Unity (Bare Metal lets you run your server without Unity at all, and you can run both a Bare Metal version & a Unity version simultaneously.)

I haven't checked into the newer features compared to other competitive assets (ex. Websockets), but the No CCU Limit + Full Source Code alone make it overwhelmingly better than any other asset. Instantly & Forever.

Also Unity (UNET) is notorious for having buggy releases with problems that don't get fixed for years. Without that source code, you can't do anything but find a frustrating workaround. I can't stress enough how important that source code is. When UNET first released, it was outright broken. I don't know how well they've maintained their updates, but I know for a fact it's far from perfect & people still have problems with it all the time.

With every bug fix & major feature update, Forge becomes increasingly better choice. And this is starting from the beginning, when Forge was IMO still the best choice the moment it released. I can't stress that Souce Code / No CCU combo enough. THAT is what is perfect about it.

For the price, this networking package is unbelievable. IMO it's ridiculously cheap, just like all the wonderful assets in the asset store. The Asset Store which IMO, is the #1 best & biggest feature of Unity, and the absolute reason I decided to use Unity. Because of assets like Forge.

Without Forge, I would not be making a multiplayer game. That is how bad all the other assets are, IMO.

 

I've used Forge, Bolt, Photon and unet. Forge is the best by far IMO.
I'm really curious to see what you guys have to announce by the way. This in particular:

Relay server ?

 

That's my guess

 

Haha, there is a MASSIVE update coming with lots of amazing new toys . We decided to resolve some of the big requests from users and give a little something extra at the same time.

Thanks for the kind words! We all are working as hard as possible right now to make sure that we provide the best networking tool on the market

 

UNet also has no CCU limit if you run your own server + it has Cloud if you need it in future. No any Cloud in Forge at all.

Not any advantage, I can run Unity in without graphics mode on server. It takes much less resources aswell.

Same problem with bugs in Forge. In Unity 5.3.4 UNet works just perfect

Github source code access gives me nothing. I want to use Networking lib, not to develop it.

75$ for Forge, 0$ for UNet.

I just try to be objective

 

I have reported you. Again, take it to another thread, I'm not going to waste my breath on you in this thread to tell you how you are wrong.

 

Why not? This is an open forum to discuss advantages and disadvantages of your product. I see only - we are better than UNet without any real speed and CPU load test

 

Just to be clear, although you have been reported.

Forge can been put on any cloud service you want, Unet only offers their own paid ccu service, limited and potentially more expensive. Also source code access is industry standard, to assume the solution will fit you perfectly is optimistic, it is a massive massive point to have source code access, me using the package professionally is what led me to getting to know the team and now working in the forge team.

The overhead of BM is SIGNIFICANTLY less, again, any larger project would demand this. What game wants to pay cloud server costs for the overhead of unity when the server doesn't require it. It is absolutely valuable that you can pay less in server costs literally.

If you cannot see the features as valuable that is subjective to you, please don't bring it to our personal thread. Forge is far far less buggy at this point than it ever has been and certainly boasts a considerable feature set.

Refer to my first point, developing a game can involve developing a variety of things, we don't offer you access to get you to develop the networking solution. But to ensure at no point are we precluding you from what you may want to do with the networking solution.

- Mark

 

Some of the things you have said are directly in contradiction to
the guidelines for this sub forum - http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/important-read-this-first.75363/

as the thread is for the promotion and representation of the forge networking asset, not your feeling that it 'isn't as good as unet'

the rules of the whole forum - http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-developer-network-rules.151485/

as you are hijaking the thread to talk about something other than the original purpose of the thread

 

...
Hippocoder? :-/

 

I just compare your network solution with Unity core UNet networking. I see no any crime in doing this. If your product is so awesome please correct me and show the real advantages other than No CCU limit and Source Code on Github. Please make some real life stress test under heavy load, show packet loss, CPU and network usage

 

Um... troll bait much?

 

Thing is, you've been corrected on almost every point already but I suspect it's irrelevant.Just the fact that you dismiss forge being open source, while boasting that unity has its own cloud service is pretty indicative that you probably don't know much about what you are talking about or at least never used or is going to use any of these solution professionally.

 

it doesn't take a genius to workout unity running an overhead costs more to host x many servers. And if you read the feature sets of the two products you'd get the answer. It's not a crime, just against the forum rules.

 

Its not a reply to what is quoted but to your judgmental nature.

Forge just feels more simpler and logical than UNET and Photon is, at least for me.

 

Thank you all for your support . So lets try to get this thread back on track for new viewers (those that can actually get to page 40 of this thread haha)

So I think that we are going to move some of the email questions into Reddit so that they are easily searchable, we do have some duplicate questions coming in from there. We also want to put them there not just as a FAQ but also as an easy way for people to search Forge Only questions and topics using their subreddit searching .

 

As user abrasive has no interest in purchasing this product and this thread is for customer support, I've removed his right to post here.

 

lol, I often skip to the last page for the latest updates.
On a side-note, I wouldn't mind giving forge a try one day. I only really knew about this thanks to @DanielSnd, who used forge to implement Rocket Fist's online. (Well, if it's got online now, I know he was doing experimeents a while ago with it)

 

Haha, I am about the same way

Oh awesome! Yeah, his game has online, he released with steamworks for NAT hole punching but I think is now porting back to Forge.

We are actually busy with a ton of new updates, so we will be sure to keep you posted here with announcements and the like .

 

Awesome. will be watching this.

 

Thank you all for your support in helping us build Forge to the product it is today. I really appreciate the moderators taking action in a swift manner to solve any problems that we have when trying to help our customer base with any issues that they need to discuss further.

As for comparing products, I am not going to praise one over the other because of the reason of sounding Bias and what this thread is for. Instead I am going to say that each product that is out there for Networking has it's pluses and minus as much as any other product that you find. We just so happen to really appreciate our product so we will praise it more than others for the fact we do believe in our product and home that you also can respect our opinion as much as we can respect yours.

There is no wrong in choosing the networking solution that is right for you as they are all equally good choices in the right hands. You all can become masters of networking with any given solution and I hope that you all do one day realize that potential in yourself as well.

That all being said, thank you again for your support and we will be working diligently on our product so please do look forward to the updates to come.

 

Yep, my steamworks implementation is unstable as hell, I'm almost finished with porting back to forge, should get a version back up with forge working by the weekend. @FuzzyQuills I tested so many different networking solutions, I honestly can't recommend forge enough, it is the best out there.

 

Announcement!
In our efforts to get more people to subscribe and participate in the Forge Networking subreddit (as it is a great place to ask questions and search through previous topics only related to Forge Networking), we are going to start announcing the huge updates that we have been doing there.

We also want to push it to the subreddit so we can get isolated feedback and suggestions based on each of the announcements. Having various announcements in this one forum thread or in Slack would be a nightmare to separate responses out.

We will start announcing the various things we are doing periodically in the Forge subreddit starting this evening! See you all there.

Note: We will still post official announcements here for releases and everything else, we are not abandoning this thread by any means, so keep posting! XD We simply are going to offload selected traffic to reddit for further discussions on that particular announcement. What we will not be posting on this thread are things we are currently working on announcements as we would rather have good isolated discussions about them

 

For the few things I've seen in the Forge tutorials, I'm very interested in this asset. My goal is to make a multiplayer game with a dedicated server, like those for First or Third Person Shooter.
If I would buy the Forge asset, what should be my next steps to get that result? (in that case I would pay for a hosting service with dedicated servers to handle that kind of game).
I've never programmed server-side and I have experience only with the Unity built-in network system, so please explain things "slowly" and step by step

If the explanation would be clear enough, I would buy the asset as soon as possible.

Thanks

 

Finally purchased Forge. How to join Slack?

 

http://developers.forgepowered.com/...nityAssetStore/How-to-Register-Invoice-Number

See you there!

 

Awesome, so you are looking to host the servers yourself?

Ah! Seems like it. Okay so the first thing you would need to do is be able to setup a server, there are a couple of ways that you can do this. I would highly recommend going through our tutorial on running the server on a machine you have at home first to test the waters and get a feel for it. If you have a computer laying around that you don't use often, you can actually host the server yourself (considering your internet is acceptable for this). Once you have a feel for this, I would recommend going through our tutorials on building for a Linux server .

Once you have done the above and you are understanding it a bit better you are ready to start looking at some cloud providers. Amazon EC2 has a free tier for a year (you can host a free server) otherwise they have various pricing plans for the different sized servers. You can also use Azure as they have an easy to use interface, tons of simple step by step documentation, load balancers, scaling, etc. There are plenty of other providers if you do not like these services such as Rackspace as well .

Our user community also has created walkthroughs on our private wiki about how to get up and running here (though you need to be a Forge Owner to view the Wiki). There are a few things to learn when running a server, getting Forge to build out a server application is the easy part, literally a couple of button clicks. After that all you need to do is set it up on your cloud or local server (machine) and you are ready to go.

If you follow the guide mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, then you are essentially ready to run the server, there is only a few things you have to do first if you are hosting from a cloud server:

1. Create a VM on the cloud service provider
2. Update the firewall (port rules) for the server port (default 15937)
3. Connect to the server via SSH (Secure Shell - Linux) or RDC (Remote Desktop Connect - Windows)
   
4. Upload the server application
5. Run the server

After that it is just about getting the public (static ip address) of your server and connecting to it

 

The new MASSIVE update announcement is up!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ForgeNetworking/comments/4k6khd/forge_networking_remastered/

 

Fair enough, I take your word for it. Will most definitely try it someday.
Good luck on Rocket Fist BTW. May as well visit the thread sometime again.

 

Is there a way to see that guide in the wiki page before the purchase? For me the options are two:
1. I'm really sure I can afford what I need with forge, and I would be also sure that with your guide/explanation I can reach my objective (and in THAT case I would use a dedicated server setup for my game)
2. I remain here where I am, with the unity network system and the host/client setup.
I'm not so sure about my abilities to achieve the result needed. For example, I've seen your tutorial for the home Linux server and in the list there are other that would be exactly what I need. What if I, in the end, can't make things work on server-side? With this kind of doubts, I would appreciate all kind of guide/help I could find

 

@AlterSpace We will make setup guides for other various platforms such as Azure and Rackspace as well. I am confident in your abilities to achieve a cloud server . Once you have the box running and the endpoints open, you are actually ready to go by just running your game server build on the machine.

I have attached the guide from the wiki as a PDF here. Please let me know if you need further help and we can make guides for setting up Linux and doing other cloud providers as well.

 

Forge Remastered sounds really awesome
Two questions:
When will the first version be out ?
I already have a fully working game that uses Forge, what will be required (code-wise) to update it to this brand new version ?

Keep up the fantastic work

 

We are hoping to have the early Alpha build out to select users either late next week or by the 4th of June. Once we validate the Alpha build we will quickly move into open beta. Since we built Remastered in a specific way (completely independent of Unity) we can actually write good solid Unit tests to take care of a LOT of the stability checks.

Since we removed reflection for performance and stability, at first, things will look quite a bit different. Although we have moved some things around, we have also greatly simplified the process of getting your game networked. As stated, we will be providing UI to "build" your base network code and mock up your RPCs.

At the moment I don't want to set any expectations as we are doing final stages of architecture and design. We will make posts as we proceed to show what is new and how to work in the updated system. We also will be providing migration tutorials to help users move to the new Remastered system. Lastly we will be making posts very soon about the architecture design choices so that we can start to get feedback even before we hit Alpha .

Thanks! We will!

For everyone else who wants to know what @Superjayjay is referring to, please see this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ForgeNetworking/comments/4k6khd/forge_networking_remastered/

 

Hello, I'm liking forge networking so far but I'm having major problems with player movement, I've tried a whole bunch of combinations and nothing I do seems to result in the server being authoritative over the movement while giving clients instant feedback on their movement.

I'm creating a 4 player brawl game with game controller support using InControl plugin.
When players connect they network instantiate their own OnlinePlayer object which just keeps track of player number and anything related to that player that doesn't have anything to do with movement, life, etc. You connect into a lobby and the host starts the match when everyone is ready. So far so good, easy peasy.
Once the server has loaded the level, it waits for everyone to finish loading before doing any game logic. Now comes the part which I've spent nearly a week trying to get working properly... Instantiating the actual pawns and getting the movement to work properly. The results I get vary from the server having complete authority but the client movement is super laggy, the client having complete authority resulting in smooth controls but the server can't correct anything, and anything in between.

1.Who network instantiates what? Does the server network instantiate everything? Does whoever network instantiate automatically get authority and ownership of the instantiated object?

2.What exactly is the difference between ownership and authority? Is authority just who decides the true state of the object and ownership is who is associated with the object?

3.What does Distance Stop and Angle Stop mean in the network controls?

4.What is the Easy Controls for in the network controls? I see it says Lerp but you can disable the easy controls, so is this a different interpolation than the interpolation panel above that can also be disabled? Or is it a redundant disable button?

5.What is IsPlayer in Easy Controls? Is it for the object that the player is moving around ( pawn )? Or the object that is spawned when they first connect? And what does it mean for the network logic?

6.It seems that the best result I could get was that the server was completely authoritative and the client was updating it's position every time it got and update from the server. What would be wrong with just letting the client completely execute all movement locally as if it was completely authoritative but then correct it if it got to far away from the correct position on the server?

7.Does client side prediction do nothing because I'm using game controllers as input and you're supposed to use forge's own input functions that only works with keyboard and mouse inputs?

8.Is OwnerUpdate only there to save you from checking for ownership or does all the logic you want predicted need to be in the OwnerUpdate or else it won't be predicted?

I hope you have time to read and reply so I can stop stress balding