Unet? Free unlimited users networking?

Hey everyone,

I have quit unity networking for couple of years but I have recensently started again. Ofcourse a lot of things have changed in the couple years. I have re-read the complete networking api and Multiplayer service. After that I only had one more question: is there still a way to make a multiplayer game which can have "unlimited" users (for example 20000 concurrened users), when I used to work with unity you could initialize games with the unity masterserver but I heard they shut that future down. I don't want to make use of cloud based servers, so would the only way be creating my own masterserver or is there still a feature in unity3d so we can make use of their masterserver without paying?

Thank you in advance

 

You can create a separate server project and use uNet. There's no upper limit on CCU and all you have to pay for is the hosting of the server.

20K CCU is still quite a lot, and bound to bottleneck somewhere. It depends on the type of game and frequency of messages, but lets say 15 outgoing messages per second to each user, would be asking the server to send out 300,000 messages a second or 6000 per frame at 50fps.

Some sort of zoned architecture might be better, so that no one server is being asked to handle more than a few hundred CCU, or a bespoke load balancing system - uNet might have something on the roadmap to help, I'm not sure there.

 

Thank you, I will try it this way. Do you have any recommendations for the hosting of the server?

 

It depends how far the development line you are. To start with, I would use a 2nd machine on your local network to host the server(s), but as you get further on, you want a host that's cheap and extensible so you pay the minimum until you're getting much closer to release. No point throwing money away.

I'm using ToggleBox right now, as during development, it's very cheap and not let me down once. I'm sure there are plenty of others around, and probably your needs will change as development and direction move forward.

 

I'm using a free google cloud trial for my beta test. It's like $300 credit you can use over a year. Server is about 70$ a month with the setup I went for. It can probably be even cheaper depending on the game.

 

Often times you can run multiple servers per machine. Keep that in mind. And for release, I recomend looking into Amazons hosting. They have a ton of locations, good prices etc. You can also get a free year over there with something like 1 vCore and 1 gb memory if i remember correctly.

 

If you've got spare CPU capacity, running multiple servers on different ports on the same hosted machine is a good way to minimise outlay.