We need some advice from experience developers

Hi guy's,

I have some decent experience in single player stuff but we are new in the multiplayer thing here and we would appreciate some advice to clear some confusion regarding the hosting provider we should look for.

We are interested in using Ulink for our game and so far what is my understanding is that they provide the server infrastructures but if i get this right we will need another hosting provider for the game website&forum?

As an example let's take a game like RUST and what type of hosting would you guy's choose for a similar game?

Thank for any info regarding the matter

 

I am in no way qualified to make a real experienced remark to help you. That said I may have something helpful.

I think uLink is just a package to help write networking. They charge you a license to use it commercially. This differs from the Photon networking package which charges you by the congruent connection (number of max connections at the same time, basically through the roof for anything large ). So basically you'll need a computer with a super fast connection to deal with all the network traffic.

The amazon cloud (amazon puts its old computers up for cheep rental and use) might be a nice place to start, its fully scalable and not very expensive. They have everything available from a remote desktop view of a server where you have a actual desktop (simulated) to a more data interface hosting.

Theoretically you could host your website on your same server by setting up a web server program and having it deliver web pages while the same server interacted with player data. I'm pretty sure that's a horrible idea though because if either one gets a heavy load the other will suffer. Grabbing a domain name for a few dollars a year and a hosting package from $12 a year on sale (unlimited but sometimes slow delivery) to say $15 a month for (plausibly) good hosting is preferred to deliver your webpages and give you a nice back end to admin your website files from.

If your program had a huge load in one area you might have to split it between servers and have players transfer (seamlessly) between servers. A ugly solution has been the shards or the channels solution where you simply force people to servers that are less full to separate them.
Basically eve online has one total world but every solar system runs on servers, instead of a cap per solar system they slow down time with a simulated time dilatation system(slowing the speed of in game time there) so that the server can handle the load it makes huge fights take hours and hours, world of Warcraft on the other hand has a cap in the thousands for total number of people on a server and simply separates people by design from one another by making them join a separate server(a powerful computer though).

Keep in mind in a year or two unity will have its own kick butt (hopefully ) networking built in (which would still require hosting servers though it appears unity will offer a optional hosting plan as features start to roll out)
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/12/announcing-unet-new-unity-multiplayer-technology/
probably

 

Hi poly,

Thank for answering and so far i understand now clearly after reading a lot on the matter that we are better off taking a separate hoster for the website and forum and another specialize hoster for gaming server.

It would be great if unity could build a solid networking solution since for us indie it is very expansive buying unity first 1500 than 800 for Ulink and all the other asset required for our game and all this without any guarantee that the game will sell well.

Now we are looking at a decent shared hoster for our website with good storage capacity to exchange files in team, they are so many hosters now that the confusion is ramping fast, any recommendation for a decent shared hoster except Godaddy, hostgator, Ipages since they are crap?

 

After hours of reading reviews a little under a year ago I settled on stablehost. They have some nice options, basically the two options they have are a shared server (fine for most anything) and a private server (where you rent a whole computer) which is usually only required with super high demand and spikes in demand.

Well Dreamhost is your standard super economy $24 dollars for a year for unlimited space with slow but generaly working service(on one of there multiple referral through another blog ect. sales). Worth noting there support gets mixed reviews at best.


From what I've heard though for transferring files if your going to use source control (revision control) allot of people use free bit bucket but since art assets and revisions of them add up and fill that free space quick I've read allot of people have just been using the free Drop box to push versions or art assets back and forth. Keep in mind this is somewhat dangerous and requires a little organization so someone doesn't download the latest work on it at the same time as someone else, then they both upload and someone's work gets over written.

I read where one studio actually hung up keys or such on twine and tacked them to the wall and you had to have the key to access the file, it just meant no one else was accessing it.

Revision control may go beyond what you were asking though.

*edit*
It may be worth noting that even though stable host was the best I found all hosters seem to have had issues at some point. There are higher cost level solutions such as Yahoo hosting (from what little I've seen is super supported) but several times in cost or say Amazon who always seems to favor the customer and be reliable, they may be high cost or such too.

I'd edit to make it shorter but I'm crunched for time. Stable host though was attentive and had all the standard nice website management tools of course available. Fine download speed (upload is always slower on the net) and lovely uptime.

*double edit, jinx*
I've also reassessed photons pricing structure in my research post. You have to make your own call about being tethered to a company, getting no hassle hosting, and income to cost ratio though.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/an...4-networking-what-solved.258276/#post-1708508

 

Hi again Poly,

Thank for the very informative reply and i was already interested in Stablehost but so far their shared hosting package seem only on SSD and the best shared package was having a 20 GB storage limit.

Shared hosting package on raid regular drives are much cheaper and offer bigger storage space and to what i have read so far in doesn't seem we would benefit from SSD drive at all.

I also saw many good comments about site5 but i don't like their package type.

We are only 2 in team and we can spend 20 to 30 a month for a decent solution but i hate loosing 3 days just reading about which web hosting we should get since they all have their flaws.

Our goal is to start small and we will upgrade to a vps or cloud solution when we will reach beta phase.

Regarding the cloud system like you mention Amazon it seem hard to know how their hosting package work and specially how much it cost monthly and do they even offer regular type of package like non cloud hosting?

For drop box we had use it in the past and had bad experience maybe that have change since.

Making an educated choice seem easy but it is not and required a lot of reading and patience.

Regards

 

Just a few last thoughts then I'll be quiet and let anyone else comment who would like to.

Indeed. Basically unless you have minimum thousands of viewers daily you won't exceed the machine performance of a shared machine from what I know. I do recall during my research looking at the graphs of machine demand that stable host presents showing there shared machines are not operating at squished crunch capacity but at quite a reserve.

From what I've experienced uploading to a website via ftp is slooow sometimes as ftp with numerous files just seems to take a long time. I don't know if you can run source control (git for instance) out of a web server like that but it would be a nice organized option (if you want to take the hours required to learn all about source control).

If you have an art man and a programing man style team though you could probably do just fine since you'd require only an update maybe every other day to eachother and a few file/folder spesific pushes in between. Still keep local backups though.

From what I know upload speed, just typical website speed, and file transfer protocol perhaps (ftp) would be what would slow things down. The hard drives would have 5+megs a second access on non SSD. Your still not going to get 5 megs a second transfer live from the hoster even on SSD (as far as I know, I may be getting out of my depth there).


I wouldn't mind hearing what your problem was with drop box though real quick if you get a extra minute or two.

 

Hi Poly,

Sorry for the late reply i was quite busy lately, mainly what i had experience with dropbox was synchronization problem and some important files got erased for no reason.

Regards

 

Alright, I'm aware that Drop Box has a conflict resolution algorithm and if your hosting a git repository there (horrible idea) and modify it in two places Drop Box will try to reconcile it in some way.

Also I lost a document while going back and forth it let me double open a doc on android and then saved the undeveloped one back to drop box.

Thank you for the info.

By the way the photon networking group will be giving a talk at Unite this year about jumping into networking with photon. Videos should be uploaded after the conference.

 

Hi poly,

Thank for the tip since everything regarding network is important to us right now.

Regards