koobas.hobune.stream
Starting a small-scope client/server game with Unity
Hello, I am new to Unity, but I have experience with game development. I am curious about some things specific to the Unity platform, and how I might overcome some challenges - I'm primarily looking for links to resources, tutorials, and other things. I found numerous resources via the wiki and forums, but some things I really have questions about aren't covered.
To give the short-and-sweet overview, I'm looking to do a project involving one or more central servers with some number of clients connecting up to them. The server will take care of game logic and traffic control, the clients will take care of glitz, UI, etc. (so basically every client/server game ever)
I'm not really worried about the gameplay itself (game logic is easy), but I'm more worried about how to do a few things:
How is a user interface handled in Unity? So far I've seen a lot about laying out a scene, but almost nothing about laying out a user interface, HUD, menu screens, options, and everything else - the glue that holds the world together
How is client/server networking handled in Unity? The server will be actively communicating with lots of clients, directing their user interfaces as well as the scenes around those clients and everything else going on. Are there some good tutorials specifically for the client/server model? (I have no plans to do peer-to-peer or single-player)
How is user input handled? This doesn't really seem like it would be that challenging after I look at more reference material, however are there any nice and concise tutorials on how user input works?
Related to the networking, are there any good tutorials on client/server "load balancing" - or ensuring that 50+ players wouldn't cripple your server with horribly non-performant networking/game code? I know I can find several articles outside of Unity on how to properly do client/server networking (predictive motion, packet combining, etc.) but are there major Unity-specific techniques that I should be aware of?
I really appreciate any and all answers - even if you can only answer one question.
You may consider creating a couple of questions ins$$anonymous$$d of one single monolithic one ... from what I can tell, this really is two GUI-related questions (which one would not expect from the title of the question), and two network related questions - and all four on very different technical levels. The reason I'm making that comment: a) you'll be more likely to get expert answers b) your questions and the answers will be more useful to the community for when someone looks for a solution to a specific problem c) having separate questions makes it much easier to vote up both question and answers.
in this page you can see the "creating game play" section that has sections for interface elements and unity GUI, networking and input. unity uses raknet for creating network based games but you can use any other system like smartfoxserver or even crate your own client server system because unity supports .NET sockets. there are many tutorials about how to use System.net.socket namespace. there are good examples in unity example projects and one of the projects is a networking project with 4 different networking projects here. also take a look at unitytutorials.com
As far as the Interface stuff the Lerpz escapes tutorial has a section on creating UI elements. The tutorial's page is here: http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/3d-platform-game
