Is multiplayer actually working now?

More then 3 years ago I have put a lot of effort into a multiplayer game only to conclude I am better off leaving this project after 2 weeks of trying to get clients to connect to a server that is not running on my LAN. I was using Masterserver I believe and got the error: "Receiving NAT punchthrough attempt from target XXXXXXXXX failed" and I posted about this on several places including here.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/receiving-nat-punchthrough-attempt-from-target-failed.291110/
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/889634/another-nat-punchthrough-attempt-failed.html

So 3 years have passed and I have been having tons of fun with LibGDX but I want to have another attempt at that failed game. So how are things now? I don't want to run into the same wall at the end of development, I want to develop locally and invest in a server when the game is near release.

The new HLAPI seems good enough for what I need but I have some more challenging ideas laying around that need to use the Transport Layer API. What can I expect? How is support? I have a regular job and want to make a living from game development, I really don't want to waste another couple of months.

I am expecting to create a server, run that wherever I want and connect to that with the client from any device wherever in the world without difficulty. Is this realistic for Unity? I have done multiplayer with Kryonet and that worked on Microsoft Azure Linux servers as well as on the Raspberry PI I hooked up on the network of a friend of mine. And without any problems.

 

I'm currently using LLAPI and its working fine for me (Except for a problem im facing in Android), i didn't make a game itself, some apps working as a remote on other devices, or one device streaming the scene to another, but depends on what you want to do. Working at that lowlevel let you make you own things.

 

Last I heard, NAT Punchthrough was still in the works, but otherwise yeah, multiplayer works.

 

I've messed with it a bit and I'm committing to a p2p 2d game framework, HLAPI is very convenient so far. Developing locally is really easy.

 

So if I develop a working game locally with HLAPI or perhaps even the transport layer, it can easily be ported to a linux server and clients will be able to connect without error messages that cannot be solved? How about starting the server, I have been doing a bit of HLAPI but it seems the server is a Unity program of it's own. I basically just want to communicate with the server, run some commands from the command line and write some logs to disc. I complete Unity program seems a bit overkill to me and I doubt it will run on something like a Linux server on AWS (Amazon) or my Raspberry Pi.

All I do with LibGDX/Kryonet is code the client with LibGDX/Kryonet and code the server with Java/Kryonet and perhaps a UI framework like JavaFX for the server. I would simply run the server.jar on a Linux server and everything works as intended. I could start with basic sockets from scratch or some framework, this will take a lot more time but I'm sure I can manage to get things working this way. I really want to create some 3D multiplayer games but the thought I get stuck again in the end makes me shiver.

 

Check out my plugin if you're not willing to wait for the Unity devs to get around to it: http://u3d.as/qhh