[Released] Bolt, The new generation of networking solution for unity!

Teila is saying that you should post on the official Forums as you'll get better help with Bolt than you'd get here. It's new enough that there won't already be posts *anywhere* except for the most obvious problems.

 

Soo, any ETA on this next update?

 

He's working on it, he's stated that he has a bunch of personal stuff going on that is preventing him from being on this full time: http://forum.boltengine.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=82&sid=3cc541669ba47f771ecef40731172046
And his wife has to take double shifts at the hospital because it's holiday month in Sweden, so he has to care for his son.

So, just chill out for a bit - this isn't just directed at you, but some people on the support forums seem to be going out of their way to being rude etc. Networking one of the most complex parts of game dev, and the fact that he's doing all the coding and support, combined with everything else, it's pretty understandable he's stretched thin.

Believe me, we're all eagerly anticipating the update. I'm actually using it for a commercial project right now, so there is some time pressure there.

It will be done when it's done.

 

I wasn't trying to be rude, it's understandable, as family comes first. But I'm just a bit eager, as I tossed my spare cash at this, excited to start my new project, but a few problems are stopping me.

I hope to go full speed once the new update comes out.

 

Hi guys, hi fholm!
Bought your solution and played with it whole my holidays. At the end I've got this working with my game i've developed earlier but only due "Map Launcher"
It's pretty curious, but i have not figured out how to build separate builds "server" and "client" for example to launch as application on my mac. It just don't works. No matter where the scene "BoltClearScene" stays, above or not

I'm using Mac, Unity 4.5 Pro.
My goal is to got this working on iOS devices,
Thank you

 

Found!
I've found that post about version 0.2.1.1 where is a sample for that. I've had version 0.2.0.4, the latest version from AssetStore. So all you need is to get version 0.2.1.1 by your Invoice Number on that web-form:
http://www.boltengine.com/AssetStore.aspx

Anyway it crashes on iPhone at runtime
Here is the thread about the problem http://forum.boltengine.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=65&p=1539&sid=5ed29332f9dcad5aa672fe41805e50d3#p1539

 

Well done! Ok so we will have to modify and use those startup and shutdown scenes - I'll give it a go tommorow too.

 

Hi!

An update for Bolt is going to drop either later tonight or tomorrow. If you have any direct questions about Bolt, post them on the bolt forums over at http://forum.boltengine.com.

I have also opened up access to the private bolt github repo, if you want to use the bleeding edge version and get updates faster. Email us at support@boltengine.com and provide your assetstore invoice id/paypal email and github user account to get access.

Regards,
Fredriik

 

0.2.1.4 is out, details can be found through the links in this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/2do9kt/bolt_0214_is_out_50_discount_for_24_hours/

We are running a 50% discount for 24 hours on our own site, http://www.boltengine.com.

 

Awesome. Looking forward to the documentation aswell.

 

Ohh looks like a perfect time to pick this up, can't wait to start experimenting!

 

Cool!

I hope you enjoy it! We're trying to re-establish the once-a-week release schedule from now on, but obviously there's not going to be a 50% sale every week

 

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but are there any plans to discount the Asset Store version? I'd pick it up at the 50% off price in a heartbeat, but I am rather partial to having everything tied to my Asset Store account (since it's so convenient).

 

At the moment no, since authors have very little control over changing the pricing (takes days/weeks sometimes) it's very hard for us to do any quick one-day sales.

If it's any comfort, when you purchases Bolt we give you access to our github repository (email support@boltengine.com with your receipt + github username), so you will never have to rely on us pushing out updates as you can pull them whenever you want, between versions, etc.

 

Hm. Github is a definite plus. How long is the current sale going to last?

 

Another 4 hours or so.

 

Purchased. I also sent you an email for the GitHub access.

Thanks!

 

Check your inbox

 

Awesome, thanks!

 

I will absolutely be purchasing this at some point in the future.

The other existing solutions smell bad.

 

I'm seriously considering picking this up this weekend. I have a couple of questions before I've made up my mind. Forgive me if this has been already answered or I am just being dense. I was going to grab TNet but this seems to be a much nicer solution except for a couple of points I can't find answers for. TNet handles the abstraction between single and multiplayer calls for the user. Does Bolt do this or would I have to handle that myself? Also, TNet handles opening and closing ports so that my end users wouldn't have to worry about that. Does Bolt support something like that? Thanks.

 

Hello
i just purchased this and already having trouble. When i try to test my sene i keep getting this error.
No maps are showing up in the map launcher. I would suggest making a tutorial series on how to setup a multiplayer game using bolt. If there is one can someone link it to me that would be great! here is the error message i am receiving!

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
BoltMapLoaderFree.Update () (at c:/Users/Fredrik/Documents/bolt/src/bolt/bolt/BoltMapLoader.cs:85)

 

The tutorial on the bolt site should tell you most of the things you need, including on how to setup the map stuff.

 

Bolt 0.3 is out.

Beta 0.3
We have changed the versioning scheme of Bolt to use the default MSBuild/XBuild scheme with automatically increasing revision and build numbers instead.

Fixed: Fixed several small bugs with the BoltGlobalBehaviour attribute, it should now work properly in all different configurations.

Fixed: Resolved several issues with the Build.bat and Build.sh scripts, they should now work better on both Windows and OS X, there's still more work to be done here but it's getting better.

Fixed: The bolt compiler will not automatically open and focus the scene window when you compile Bolt anymore.

Fixed: Fixed a bug in the dead reckoning code which stopped it from working

Fixed: Fixed a bug with entity destruction not replicating properly in all situations

Fixed: Several issue with the new application identifier and assembly hash have been resolved

Fixed: Resolved compilation issues for Web Player builds


Changed: BoltMapNames has been deprecated.

Changed: BoltMaps replaces 'BoltMapNames' and is a public static class with const fields on it.

Changed: BoltPrefabs is now a static class with const fields on it, instead of an enum.

Changed: Map loading has been re-worked, in general it works the same way but the internal workings have been change to eliminate a bunch of subtle quirks. The callbacks for map loading have been changed and renamed to more clearly symbol what they do, the new callbacks are:

• MapLoadLocalBegin(string map): Called when a map is begining to load locally
• MapLoadLocalDone(string map): Called when a map is done loading locally
• MapLoadRemoteDone(BoltConnection connection, string map): Called when a map is done loading on a remote computer, called for both the server on the clients and for all clients on the server.

Changed: Reworked the way BoltLog works, you can now implement your own class that inherits from BoltLog.IWriter to provide custom logging functionality. Bolt comes with four default loggers: Unity Console, System Console, File and Bolt Console.

Changed: The window previously called 'Bolt Connections' has had it's look and feel updated and is now called 'Bolt Remotes', more features will be added to this window in future updates.


Feature: Reworked the asset editor GUIs with a new style.

Feature: Bolt can now replicate mecanim layer weights, toggle the 'Replicate Layer Weights' checkbox on your Bolt mecanim asset to enable this.

Feature: Bolt provides new extension methods for mecanim for using Bolt with legacy mecanim code, they are found in the BoltMecanimReflectionExtensions class.

Feature: Added several new options for logging and the console to the 'Bolt Settings' window.

Feature: Bolt will now make sure that two peers connecting to each other are using the same application guid and that their bolt.user.dll assembly has the same hash value.

Feature: Bolt now allows you to use a session wide unique id for your entities, enable this by checking the 'Use Unique Ids' option in the 'Bolt Settings' window, each BoltEntity now exposes a property called 'uniqueId' which is gurantueed to always be unique. Find a BoltEntity by it's unique id using BoltNetwork.FindEntity(id);

Feature: You can now set the instantiate and destroy functions bolt should use with the new SetInstantiateDestroyCallbacks method on the BoltNetwork class.

Feature: BoltNetwork.Connect has gotten a new parameter called "token", this is a byte[] array of size of up to 768 which gets sent from the client to the server when it's connecting, if you are using manual connection acception this allows you to inspect the token data before hand and do things such as user authentication and verification.

Feature: You can now disable Clients from being able to instantiate certain bolt entities, on the Bolt Entity component you can toggle this on and off on a per-prefab basis.

 

Excited to finally start working with Bolt with this update, time for me to finally get rid of default Unity networking!

 

When you think to provide a beta with master and lobby server?

Thanks

 

I'd like to know the same thing. We already purchased, but will not begin to integrate until this feature exists. Well, that and Xbox support truly.

 

Yay, I just bought this because I am so frustrated with unity's networking. Just requested access to the github repo, hopefully I can start working with it soon .

 

Yeah, I'm thinking I'll have to request access to github too. It's looking like that's the expected way to work with Bolt now. If you try to go with the releases you'll get hit with bugs.

 

Sadly, we are having to try something else. We couldn't get it to work for us and our programmer had a tough time getting answers on the forums. We might try again for another project in the future.

 

Quite strange, I personally thought the forums were very active.

 

Most people are in the official Bolt Forum (Devs page). I think there is a link on the first page

 

They are active but not all questions are answered I guess. No problem, we will try again later.

 

That sounds very odd. The Bolt forums are some of the most active and helpful forums I have ever been to of any asset I have ever bought. Not only do the dev's help out but other customers as well. Has your programmer tried the Jabbr chat room? If he goes there during the day time of Swedish time, usually fholm is in there helping any and everyone with questions.

Perhaps you could point us to some of the issues? I know most people there would be more than willing to help, myself included.

 

I am not a coder so would probably not explain things correctly. I will let him know though about the chat room. I don't think he realized it existed. Thank you. We are trying another asset first but if that doesn't work or as I said before, on our next project, we will look at Bolt again.

I appreciate your help.

 

Teila: I try to answer every question on the forums, but it's possible that I have missed one in the past week as I am right in the middle of phasing out having a day job to focus on Bolt and networking consulting full time.

As compensation for any missed questions (or if there was a miss-understanding somewhere) I can offer one hour of private Skype support (no cost of course).

Also check out the Jabbr chat at https://jabbr.net/#/rooms/bolt

 

We just released 0.3.1 yesterday, and doing a 48 hours 50% sale, pick it up while you can: http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/2fw7lu/bolt_031_is_out_50_sale_for_48_hours/

 

Ehi fholm,
1) The sale is just with paypal? no about unity asset store?
2) About master and lobby server?
Thanks

 

It is just on PayPal on our site, yes, we can not do "sales" at will on the asset store, it's tied to the "madness"-sales, etc. and we do not control the scheduling.

we = asset sellers.

 

master/lobby server is getting work done on it currently, hopefully out within a month.

 

Wait a minute... oh I misread that, I thought you were quitting your day job to work on Bolt full time. I missed the 'network consulting' part. Regardless, awesome.

 

Most of the consulting work is putting bolt into existing games, and all the improvements that go into bolt for that will also go into the public version of bolt, it will most certainly be bolt 6-8/h day from now on.

 

this is currently on 24-hr deal...

maybe this have been asked before but does this have AoI?

 

Area of Interest? Yes bolt has something called 'InScope' which is a method you can override to decide what a specific connection should be aware of, it also supports custom prioritization with 'CalculatePriority' (two methods you can override on the BoltEntitySerializer class)

 

yes it is.
i also found some sample usage on the support forum of bolt as well.
ill do some research and buy it before the sale ends.
cheers!

 

Yay Bolt is deal of the day! I am tempted... very very tempted... to buy it again off of the asset store so I can post a review.

 

Information for everyone buying from the Asset Store today (Bolt is the 24 hours 'Deal of the Day')

1. To get the absolutely latest version of Bolt, go to this page http://www.boltengine.com/AssetStore.aspx after you have purchased and punch in your asset store invoice number, the 0.3.1 version is uploaded to the Asset Store but is currently in 'review' which is why you get an old version there at the moment. An update for the 0.3.1 version is scheduled for about ~2 hours from now, it will be version 0.3.2 which fixes a few minor issues with the samples project, this is also available on the same link.

2. If you need help with bolt, head over to the Bolt Support Forum: http://forum.boltengine.com/

 

Also, one more thing to those of you buying today: We provide free access to our github repository, which always contains the latest and most up-to-date version of Bolt. Just email support@boltengine.com with your asset store invoice number and your github username.

 

Can this be used for any kind of multiplayer game ?

What scenarios can it cover ?

Also is it possible to combine hot seat and network multiplayer with it ?

 

The general recommendation I give is that bolt was built for 2-128 player games, the "max" player cap relies heavily on your game obviously. It can cover most scenarios, as it allows client-to-client connection on local lan (including local lan discovery), dedicated server over the internet (hosting is up to you), or listen-servers over the internet.

I'm not sure what you mean by hot seat? if it's like splitscreen, then yes you can have 2 local players playing against other remote players no problem.