Unity's networking is DYSFUNCTIONAL.

[hogus]

I'm pretty sure the forum moderators are bored of me injecting this into any thread that is vaguely related to the topic too.

[Quietus]

[andeeee]

[zumwalt]

Robur, I am a blatent idiot for never asking you this before in either private PM's, Emails or in the thread, so I mise well fess up and ask here, what "exactly" are you trying to send data wise? How many itterations per second and are you throtteling the data to match a dedicated frames per second support?

Example for this would be, are you sending the players position information, transform information and a custom class of information that would include acceleration factors in your interpolation code? Meaning are you interpolating with a prediction based on latency in the formula every frame or are you doing it based on a fixed assumed frame rate?

The best I have seen are filters that take into consideration that the average player will not have any greater than 30 frames per second of data with a 115ms network connection delay throttled using the fixedupdate instead of the update. If you are not throttling your data and dealing with a fixed frames per second on all player base, you are most likely flooding the servers with way to much data, regardless if you are dealing with it based on a time stamp difference between the sender and the receiver within a given norm, you are still sending the data which is buffered, transmitted, received and translated, so in essance is still acted on.

Over time this will eventually cause lag and delays in information being properly used on the server and on the clients, especially in a broadcast set, it becomes exponentially worse by the increased amount of players to the game. This is a flat out right thorn if you have a dedicated game server not running in batchmode.

[HiggyB]

[larus]

Hi Robur, the two bugs you submitted exhibiting strange behavior during network synchronization and also in Network.Destroy at the same time are in our database and will get processed. They haven't been closed and they won't be forgotten. I can understand your frustrations on the silence since you raised the issue and I'm sorry you were not at least informed your report looked valid and would be looked at.

The network synchronization issue you describe is of the worst kind, something bad happens randomly under some conditions. The bug report helps a lot but it will need a bit more processing where the issue can be 100% consistently reproduced in as few steps as possible. While it is still sitting in the bug queue the plan is to produce a solution for the next Unity release.

[DrHotbunz]

And the plot thickens....

[DrHotbunz]

Another day passes and Robur has not arrived to kick ass...

[Quietus]

[Ethan]

i am also going the raknet plugin way.
not only for the known reasons, also because of performance and stability

will share it if it becomes usefull

[robur]

Larus;

Glad to hear that Unity is interested in resolving these bugs. Very glad to hear that it is scheduled for the next release!

If you play Mars Explorer for 20 minutes or so with several other players, you or someone else in the game is practically guaranteed to experience the "No Connection" issue.

To facilitate the isolation and resolution of all the bugs discussed in this thread, I am providing Unity the complete project folders for the latest version of Mars Explorer, and for Mars Explorer's headless dedicated servers.

The complete Mars Explorer 2.21 project will be accessible through support ticket # 313286.

Mars Explorer's dedicated server project (along with pertinent client networking code and custom WiggleBox bug test projects) is available for all interested parties to download here.

All The Best,

-Aubrey



Others;

Quietus is quite right, I am very busy with other things (such as the 2.6.1 webplayer failure), upcoming Whirld 3 library, and release of Mars Explorer 2.21 (Be sure to check out the brand new Sky King world - it's awesome! ...And I did fix the buggy handling Zumwalt

At this point, I honestly can't recommend the use of Unity's networking to anyone. I am looking forward to sharing my experiences once I have had a chance to delve deeply into Lidgren.

[zumwalt]

What was the fix to the buggy handling?
I am finding that in 4 different network libraries, Unity client simply stops sending data over time from the client, so I backed to a TCP/IP Sockets version that also experiences this when communicating between Mono's version of System.Threading and .Net version of System.Threading, something isn't right between the two different versions. I can't put my finger on it, but I can guarantee a connection from the client to the server, but Unity is simply throwing an invalid Thread message back to the thread state in Unity itself but I still get data from Unity because the thread is running, the port is open, the communication is happening, the server gets the message, but it is like a simplex connection.

I have gotten zero response back from Unity on this issue, and also with an editor bug issue that I have discovered with regards to the view frustum and transform.forward as another issue, I have zero problems out side of Unity with the network component in TV3D, and in 3Impact but Unity on the other hand, same code, same everything, simply dies. It appears to be Mono specific problems though, so I seriously doubt they will even bother to respond about either of these two issues since frankly it has nothing to do with Unity per say but the fact they are using a bug riddled version of Mono.

[Quietus]

[jashan]

I'm planning to do "larger-scale multiplayer" in the longer run and Traces of Illumination is kind of my testcase for that ... and Unity's built-in networking, while in my opinion, quite beautifully designed for what it was meant for ("make lower-scale networking somewhat accessible to the masses") just wasn't designed for "larger-scale multiplayer" (the bugs sure are annoying but I'm sure at *some* point in time they *will* be fixed but I doubt the main direction is likely to ever change towards anything larger scale and it's probably even questionable whether that would be desirable at all) ... I guess it just took me a very loooong time to really get this (it's not like UT is making a secret about its networking being meant for "low-scale")

So ... I'm currently considering changing the networking-backend and moving over to Photon for the networking. I haven't decided for sure, yet - mostly because that means I'll not only have to "do a little porting" but basically have to re-design and re-write large parts of my networking-approach (just one example: I have 115 different RPCs ... that is "no big deal" in Unity but will probably be a nightmare in Photon ... and there's a lot of other aspects ... at least, fortunately, I'm not using buffered RPCs, Networking.Instantiate or NetworkView-synchronization ... lucky me ).

With Unity's networking, basically, I've hit what I think to be a "solid wall" at around 80 or so players per server ... and Unity networking only supports connecting to a single server at a time (and that aspect is *very* unlikely to ever be changed; admittedly, I don't think that's something a lot of people really need, so for what Unity networking is intended for, there really is no reason to change that). There would be ways around that limitation (I could do server-transfers for clients and do "chat over multiple servers" via the backend database to which all servers connect). But ... that just doesn't feel like fun so, while I haven't made the final decision, it's *very* likely that I'll move over (fingers are already tickling).


Anyways, regarding what zumwalt wrote about Mono:

[Quietus]