A really, really special uLink indie offer.

Personally, I'd be happy with a permanent indie licence cost of $500 without tech support ... part of being an indie / hobbyiest is to happily struggle through the learning process and figure things out yourself or with communities like this one.

 

At our homepage, you can find that MuchDifferent is an non-profit organisation, who’s only bottom-line is to pursue excellence and create tools that furthers the capabilities of others. All our income is put to this goal. No other considerations are made as this is the single reason for our existence.

With this limited indie offer, we do not only offer uLink but a complete back-end system with the same ease of use, love and amazing performance that you already have grown use to, uLink - for only 500 €. I agree that the only bad thing with this deal is that it is too good to last forever. However, we will continue to offer uLink indie licences long after this campaign. With the beginning of next year we will bring you nothing short of a new dawn in how online games are made.

And it will never be a waste of time learning our technology. What we’ve done for the Unity Engine has not gone unnoticed by people that are serious about networking. One of them who have been studying and learning every little detail about our technology is Epic Games. Others have outdone themselves trying to copy our designs, ideas and functionality. We are very proud of this. If you remember a year ago, how companies that offered solutions for networking told you that it was hard, time consuming and complicated to make a Unity multiplayer / MMO. Now they say it is easy, fast and simple. Sure, sometimes it is nothing but sales talk but I hope that we have helped with improving networking for more than just our own costumers. Simply by showing how it could be done. And with products such as uLink and PikkoServer, I hope that we have also proven that there is no law of nature that forces you to choose between either performance or ease-of-use. With Epic Games, it is a little bit different, they have asked us to make the same tools that we now offer you, available to Unreal developers as well. Our cooperation in doing this has already started since this summer and it is looking very promising.

We have a special kind of love for networking that we drench in every little detail of what we do. Furthering the capabilities and servicing more developers on different development platforms is a natural step for us to take as we have the most ambitious vision of what the future of online games will look like. Next year is going to be a fantastic ride in this direction and the tickets are already for sale.

 

Thank you Christian for responding to our queries.

Firstly, you are not-for profit. WOW. That's impressive. It'll be a pleasure to work with such a dedicated team, with what appears to be an exceptional platform.

Secondly, the continuation of Indy licenses. Thank you It's very good to know that I'll be enabled to use the effort I expend now to help others network in the future. Can you give any indication of future Indy fees or is that still being determined?

My last question is that as a freelancer, wanting to build and run small experiments to help better my knowledge on your platform. Should I be investing in a license now or will you enable that access by some other means (e.g. continuing the unrestricted eval license and extending it to all products in current Indy bundle). Of course, should I decide to purchase the license - you would not have issues with me not knowing what game I'd eventually use if for?


Much thanks for your response, your products and your future products.


NPSF3000

 

The price for indies will continue to be competitive. However, as the knowledge of how powerful our technology really is will be more recognized, I believe that people will look back at this offer and slice their wrists if they didn't buy at least one licence now.

Our UnityPark Suite technology will slash months of development time for any network project and years for really serious projects. As a freelancer, I would buy a bulk of these indie licences and advertise this for my costumers, making them turn to me when they want to make a multiplayer / MMO game. Damn it. We will even make sure that you can get your money back if you later find this to be untrue.

Edit: We have now made it official at our homepage. Everyone can now enjoy our "get-your-money-back-if-you-are-not-happy" guarantee.

 

Continued in PM.

 

We at MindHammerGames are one of the most happiest customers of the guys at muchdifferent. what everyone should know that their tech is really capable of creating high end MMOs using unity servers and their tech.
in this 500 euro license you'll get uLink for networking but also you'll get much more software which is not something for hobbiests
you'll get uGameDB which is an advanced database solution for saving all datas of an MMO with a scalable backend for write heavy databases which write much data unlike normal databases which are heavy in reading data.
you'll getuZone for instancing/load balancing which is only needed by big games (big games are not hobby)
you'll get uCollab/uTsung which are free at this time for testing and running multiple synched unity instances to develop faster and test better.
and also will get uLobby which is a powerful lobby/account management system.

the only thing that you might want to experement with as a hobby is uLink itself which is experementable completely. the trial just prevents you from having commercial servers by checking your license key and no other limitations.

about muchdifferent i should say that
they will implement features that we want as fast as possible in timestamps of two weeks or so. they really listen to us well and answer questions in minutes or a few hours and not a day or so

they are scientists with roots in universities and are not businessmans here to just make money.
i recommend everyone to try their uLink and uCollab and then you'll choose them if you really want to make a networked games.
epic games is not an stupid company. they know who they are working with.
all other networking solutions for unity just send/receive messages for you and nothing else.
even if your game is not an MMO their stable solution is awesome. their uLink is really powerful and it's new methods/callbacks/custom serializers don't seem great at first but when you use them then you'll understand how much different it is

i can tell you that using pikko server the and uZone/uGameDB the solution wiould become as powerful as MMO middlewares with ease of use of unity integrated. we tried many MMO middlewares before choosing their tech. the freefall arcade guys were in activision before and they choosed it. some big companies choosed competitors like photon because they just needed a message delivery solution and nothing else.
you know, codemasters know how to make all of their car game logic in C#/Erlang/any other solutions. i am aware of some big MMOs that they have plans to convert to uLink/Unity solution soon.
i am sure that soon big companies like EA/big point will use uLink in future projects.

anyone who needs more info could email nice guys at muchdifferent or us info@mindhammergames.com

there should be something in their tech that i paied them and now i am advertising them in this way. i am busy but happily would answer all questions about them.

 

$800 is already not really competitive (for hobbyists, at least). I've played around with the trial and really love uLink, but $800 is simply not something I could justify spending right now. It could be when my game is ready to launch, but obviously this one month deal will be over by then.

 

It is incredibly competitive with far more features and at significantly less cost than any of the competitors that spring to mind.

Affordable is a different thing altogether and obviously depends on your individual circumstances.

To make use of this suite your going to be investing at least 4-5 figures on the networking side alone, so a $800 investment is a bargain IMO. If you only need a subset of functionality ping me a PM about your game if you wish and I'll see if I'd be able to help out any. While uLink appears is pretty awesome, there any many ways to skin a cat. If it turns out that I can't help you, I'd seriously reconsider this offer!

 

Thanks for catching this, Gnoblin! You are correct. We have mentioned this a little bit everywhere. Here at our homepage under licences and in this comparison document (Row 21, Column K).

These are just two examples but we will look at how we can make this information more accessible.

 

Is there any way we can maybe make a down payment or something on an $800 indie license and reserve the price tag?

 

When you ask so nicely, how would we be able to resist.

 

sorry for lots of typos in the last message. i thought that it's a good idea to describe it better.
i told that it's not a hobby because even if you have it for free you would not be able to have your own host or do anything useful with it without some money.
we ourselves had to wait about a year and then after finding this tech we became able to execute the project cause with all other solutions in that time you couldn't make the game with less than 200k$
now it's possible to make an MMO with less money but again you'll need VC or some sort of investor/publisher at release time.
so if it's a hobby then uLink itself is enough, believe me!
try it and create your prototype, contact anyone who you should or even the muchdifferent guys themselves, they are much nicer than what i could describe
they'll become the default networking platform for unity soon.

i just wonder how unity technologies can stand and don't describe different networking solutions for its users. even in their networking solutions page, they don't mention the uLink and it's fellows.

 

I posted this on the tutorial forum but since it's uLink related, I'll ask here as well. Does anyone know of any video tutorials for uLink? I find the easiest way to learn a new technology is to watch videos where someone builds a project from scratch using that technology and explains each step of the process. Does anyone know of any such tutorials?

 

http://developer.unitypark3d.com/examples/

 

Thanks ... those are the ones I'm going through at the moment along with the uLink manual. However, I was wondering if there was anything such as the excellent 3DBuzz video tutorials for Unity?

 

Alright, well I joined the uLink wagon . After spending about 40hrs of effort working with different solutions and rolling my own, it just seems like the right choice. Will post progress here as I work with it, my target is to have a 4-8 player co-op style game using an dedicated authoritative server with upwards of 64 Unitysteer driven monsters on screen at once. If this can be handled smoothly and uLink scales well in terms of aPI complexity, I'm a very happy customer!

 

Christian,

Thank you very much for clarifying all of these points.

I think for the Unity Community, them most important point is that there are no technical restriction if one wants to continue to evaluate uLink past the 30 days indicated on the license. TBH, I had completely forgotten the note on the network comparison page and I had not read the fine print on the uLink page: http://muchdifferent.com/?page=game-unitypark-products-ulink

I was only looking at the "30 Day Trial" note, rather than the perfectly clear explanation:


-

So - If I can sum up what I'm hearing:

The free trial license is essentially open ended.
This is great news. One of the major obstacles is being able to learn, test and get up to speed with a networking product at one's own pace. According to Ashkan "... the trial just prevents you from having commercial servers by checking your license key and no other limitations" This means you can get your game up and running, and purchase a commercial license when your game is ready.

A-really-really-special-uLink-indie-offer.
The current indie offer for €500 (+VAT) is SUPER SPECIAL because includes everything you'd need to get a massive game up and running:
- uLink
- uLobby
- uGameDB
- uStream
- uZone
- uCollab*
- uTsung*

Be aware that even though there is no end date stated, this is listed as "... 30 days ... Starting from the Unite 11" which ran from September 28-30, 2011. This means this offer is expiring very very soon; either the 28th or 30th of October.

Continuing Indie License without a waiting list?
According to Christian Lonnholm: "However, we will continue to offer uLink indie licences long after this campaign." This means that MuchDifferent will continue to offer uLink-only indie licenses for €500 with no waiting list. The additional parts of the Suite ( - uLobby, - uGameDB, - uStream, - uZone) will be available for purchase separately, but the free tools will still be ... free! ( - uCollab*, - uTsung*)

*free

Let me know if anyone sees anything in error here.

 

I'm guessing the licenses are non-transferable? I am leaning towards emptying my PayPal account on a uLink-license before the offer expires, but what if I never get the time to use it? Can I sell it to someone?

I will need uLink if I decide to make a MMO-version of this game I'm making now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Ab4X0vQHc - I can't quite see the need for uLink for my current game because it was designed with multiplayer in mind from the very beginning and I already achieved authoritative server and interpolated predicting rigidbodies using the default Unity networking functions. I also developed my own PHP/MySQL backend for player management as seen in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nE7fto_vkE - this is why I find it hard to motivate €500 on buing it for this particular game...

 

Imply: Don't forget the money back guarantee. Not sure how long they'll wait for you to decide, but the guarantee is now official.

 

Hey guys, just a short question... does anyone know if ulink would work on mobiles (iOS Android) ? I would like to use it for a mobile game, are there any obstacles/restrictions to that?

 

zemog86: Yes, this should work on all platform targets (Web - Yes, Mac App - Yes, PC App - Yes, iOS - Yes, Android - Yes) I'm unclear about the consoles, tho'.

 

From what I am hearing, this special offer is almost over:

Our offer have been available since the start of Unite so it is 30 days from the 28th.

 

Thanks Angel

 

zemog86: For a quick overview of the networking options, click on the "Multiplayer Networking Comparison" in my signature.

My current fav. is uLink.

 

I'm guessing the "money back guarantee" must last into the next year since most of the package content won't be available until then if you purchase today.

 

We at MuchDifferent have had reasons to party these last couple of days so I have either been too drunk or too hung over to answer. So let me try to address all of your questions in one post.

Does uLink and the UnityPark Suite work on all the platforms that Unity supports?

Yes. Here is Oleg at Unity demonstrating a uLink authoritative server, cross platform version of Angry Bots. This demo took one person, one day to make and it also works on consoles.

Can I use uLink without paying?

Yes. It is true that you can make an entire game with uLink and only buying it when you want to release the game since there are no technical restrictions to the evaluation version. And this is fine for many people that just want to play around with our technology, but I would not recommend it for indies or professionals that want to release a commercial game. It is much better to e-mail us and give the reasons why you would need more time before purchasing uLink and we will most likely give you the time you need. For non-commercial uses of uLink, such as a number of university projects or artistic projects, we have been giving it away for free. I would estimate that about 20 such projects are ongoing around the world.

I have a game that works fine right now with Unity built-in network. Should I change?

Yes. We have outlined the most important reasons here in this document. Still, the main reason is that your game deserves better. You deserve better than spending time on problems that are already solved. This time is better spent on exploring how your game would benefit from having an RPG element in it where you can upgrade weapons, armory and engine (with help of the uLobby). Or how your game would be like in a co-op arcade mode with AI and boss fights. And you should not have to worry about if leader boards are going to be tampered with and other flawed security issues that you simply can't avoid today with Unity's own network.

When does the money back guarantee expire?

Never. We only want the happiest costumers, and when I think about it, I have actually once before explained it in another forum thread awhile back.

---
Did I miss anything?

 

Thank you all who have already orderd! Now it is only 12 h left on this really, really special offer. Go and grab one!

 

I really want one - but funds won't allow it this month =(

 

I am curious what are the actual uLink limitations? Everyone seems to be talking about MMO solution and Pikko server, but what number of players are we talking here? MMO word for its genre has become too stretched already. There are some older MMOs that have gazzilion players while some others with gameplay structure that has only hundreds or thousand at most. Also is it possible to stream with it complex worlds and gameplay like in World of warcraft?

 

uLink can handle at least 100 players in an FPS and with PikkoServer it can handle at least 1000 players. If you look at the documentation you see that there are no technical limitations for making a game such as WoW much more massive with PikkoServer. There might be reasons to limit the number of players because of gameplay or adjust the gameplay to be more massive friendly - since it might not be that fun.

Though there are limitations that we have mapped out here at our homepage. More importantly you can see an example of when we send 1000 players to the middle in this video and it shows that it is absolutely possible to do things that was impossible before.

I hope this explains stuff but let me know if I can explain even more. =)

 

Let see what we can do for you

 

Christian,

I assume, when you say 100 players, you are talking about in the same space in the same zone with the same server. Like WoW, I assume that with uLink, you can get many many more people playing the same game at the same time but not in the same exact location when you are set up correctly and/or are using the rest of the Unity Park Suite (uDB, uZone, etc.). Certainly with WoW, trying to get too many people in one place, like a Capital City Raid, causes problems, but there are still hundreds playing at the same time - only in different locations - due to the architecture.

When you say 100... you mean 100 actively interacting with one another at the same time.

 

You understood me correctly. The limitation of number of players' interactions sharing the same space depends on a number of factors but the most demanding network game is a fast paced FPS game and that is why I find it to be a useful comparison. The clarification is that Unity is bound to a single core as a server. With PikkoServer that make it so that a lot of cores can share the load of player actions and interactions.

 

So if i understand correct this server solution could support theoretically the same number of players that Wow or similar MMOs have per server?

Oh yes 100 players interacting on one area is completly understandable, due to mostly hardware limitations of players computer, engine limitation and what not. I am just asking for overall server player base that can be connected at the same time and playing on that server.

 

The number of players on a server depends on how much work the server needs to do for each player. Simply, it depends on the gameplay and the intensity of the interactions between players. Since WoW is an instanced MMO, (and you can see our take on the architecture here) they do not have more than 40 players/ instance according to a wiki I found online. Thus, the bottleneck for the number of players will most likely be the database and not the network or the server instance.

Did this answer your question?

 

HI Chris,

Firstly let me say that on examining uLink..wow...what a great piece of software(s) and its integration into unity seems pretty spectacular. However, I have a few question which will help me decide if uLink is the right choice for our next title. Please note that in my previous titles we have never deployed a unity instance on the server so this is exciting for me to consider but also leaves me with some questions.

1) Room or Games
Does unity have a built in concepts on rooms/games on the same server? We have a situation where our would is divided into many rooms (each allowing around a limited number of payers), these rooms are created and destroyed as the first player enters and the last leaves. Using something like Photon for example, we have a single server instance on the machine handling dozens if not more of rooms and can have eventually start up additional server instances on other physical servers to handle the load.

Would uLink be any good for my setup? Would each room in this case need to be a separate running instance of my Unity server. This if I single server was running 20 rooms, would this mean I need to spin up 20 instances in Unity? This may be a dumb question but using Unity as a server for me is pretty new.

2) Do you have even a ball-park approx price for the rest of the suite when it is released and the pikko load balancing software?

Thanks

 

I hope you don't mind me answering for Christian.

We have been looking at how to best implement the kind of room feature that you are asking about. It is very possible to implement a custom room feature in the game itself as some of our clients already have done. However, with the release of uLink 1.3 just around the corner, we believe that we will have an elegant implementation of the room feature in uLink itself.

There is more detailed information in this thread about the room feature and custom implementations at our forum.

I'll ask Christian to answer your second question about prices.

 

Hi Gaski!

Thank you for taking a closer look at uLink and our technology! And an especially big thank you for sharing those nice words about it.

You were wondering about pricing... When it comes to PikkoServer, we will for the foreseeable future have a price and a licence that will be individually determined per project. However, for the rest of the suite, we are pushing hard to get our technology into the hands of indies. Our goal is to make it so that even if other companies would give away their technology for free - indies would still prefer to turn to the UnityPark Suite.

For professionals, we are also steadily growing our user base with a number of high profile titles, some that are yet be announced. But we have not decided on a final price just yet for the entire suite. All I know is that it always will be an easy choice to buy the UnityPark Suite as the benefits will outweigh the cost by some order of magnitude. Or, we have not done our job properly.

 

Hi Chris David,

Thanks for your quick replies.

From my point of view 500 euros seems very good value for money given that this is per app for an indie/development license. Let's face it, if you get to the point where you are forced to upgrade to pro...well then...that would suggest you haven't really got a problem at all and things are going rather nicely

I'll be honest and say that I am currently testing several solutions to make sure that I make the right choice for my project. Until I found uLink I was really only seriously considering Photon or Electro server. Having discovered uLink (currently reading through the docs) I have to say that I am definitely starting lean very much towards it as my choice but I still need to do a bit more testing etc to be happy. Which finally brings me to my question (at last).

It says the price for indie is 500 euro and that this is special limited time offer.

A) How long is left on this offer. I need to do a bit more research and testing before I commit definitely to uLink because I don't want to rush into the wrong decision for my project. How much is the indie for the UnityParkSuit or uLink normally? How long do I have before this offer ends?

On final question on a more technical note.

Is it possible to automate the start up of server instances. As my world may be quite large it will be broken down into zones/rooms where I will probably want to run each zone as a server instance. However, if possible it would be nice to only create/startup that instance when the first player enters it and power down the instance when the last player leaves it. I don't want to have 100 server instances running if there are currently only players in 25 of them.How could I accomplish this currently with uLink? Its not a deal breaker for me but is a nice to have.

Regards
Gary

Thanks

 

Hi again Gaski!

And thanks again for those additional kind words!

Sadly, the indie deal where you not only got uLink but most of the UnityPark Suite for 500 €, have already expired as of Friday last week. But since this special indie offer have been such a success, we are looking at how to extend it.

One of the products in the UnityPark Suite is called uZone and it does pretty much all the things you want with managing instances. And here you can see how our architecture for an instanced MMO and how the complete UnityPark Suite work together.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. You do not have to upgrade to a professional licence when you end up being successful.

Write me an e-mail when you feel that you have gone through the documentation and done the tests needed. There is no stress.

 

Hi Chris,

Story of my life

I LOVE that So basically the license is based on the financial success the business AT THE TIME of purchase.

Thanks again for the quick answers to my queries.

 

Hi Christian,

I just dropped you an email regarding this

 

Thanks!

 

I have some experience with UnityParkSuite and now see that people are understanding it's difference but the problem is they are worried on things that are not that hard to solve.
the point is when we started using the tech many of it's parts were not ready but adding them was not hard at all. with uLink you can really build the core mechanics of your game and then buy the uGameDB and other stuff if you can not buy them at this time. then you can easily add the functionality to your game to store/read data back.
it's great to have it all at first but don't having it is not something stopping you from making your game.

 

Just out of curiousity, what is is still needed to be done for programmer on server side programming if Pikkos server is used?

 

Great question! I am a bit lazy so I'll just copy from our manual:

The main differences between a normal uLink server and a cell server are:
- Cell servers need to support handing objects over to other cell servers. They need to provide serialization and deserialization of network objects.
- Cell servers must be authoritative.
- Manual view IDs cannot be used by cell servers.
- Initialization of cell servers is done using InitializeCellServer() instead of InitializeServer().
- Some callbacks are different for cell servers.

Follow this link to read the straight forward approach in more detail.

 

Are there demo's of the voice support in action in a Unity game?

Also, does voice support work on mobile?

 

The voice chat is something we have made available for Unity developers together with Ericsson but it is not part of our suite (we only provide the integration - not the chat server solution). However, it does work on mobile and there are currently a few games that are implementing it as we speak. I am also happy to be able to tell you that we and Ericsson are working together to provide the source code for a multi-player Angry Bots demo with voice chat for people to play around with.

You can find out more information at Ericsson's homepage.

 

Hi Christian:

Impressive architecture of the network engine integrated into Unity! I am very interested in acquiring a license. But I do have one specific question.

There are certain APIs in the documentation that are stated as not implemented:

i.e.:

Network.SetReceivingEnabled
Network.SetSendingEnabled

In addition, there seems to be some discouragement to use "group"s for networkviews and "instantiate" from the documentation. i.e. Networkviews accept "group" to be backwards-compatible with unity only and is not implemented?

What we'd like to use these APIs for is to host distinct gamerooms without having multiple instances of unity as the server. So we could have one unity server instance host 30 game rooms each of 4-10 players. These game rooms will be isolated from each other.

I have read overview of uLobby, but it seems like it is a way to manage server instances, while we are looking for a way to isolate hundreds of users in one server instance.

Is there a way to handle this situation with uLink? For both state-syncs and RPCs?

Thanks for this wonderful announcement! And thanks for your time in advance.

 

Do you really one 1 server instance to handle that many? From the pure 'fail safe' aspect, you normally definitely wouldn't want. Also data seperation, scaleability and maintainability is much higher with distinct server instances and performance wise the delta is not that high if you run 10 unity headcless client or 10 forced to handle 10 times the data (the later often is even slower depending on what you do in detail, cause all find operations etc operate on global scale so for all XX rooms you have in). also don't forget that instantiate etc then will halt ALL game rooms, not only one.

Nothing prevents you having a layer inbetween that fires new room instances as required through java / ruby / python scripts for example or even new server instances within a cloud with a whole bunch of new game instances