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Local Mutliplayer without paying?
Hello there, I'm developing a little top-down game in my free-time and lately is saw that it is now possible to write a mutliplayer game in Unity. Since I would love to play this game with my brother and my sister, I want to make my game multiplayer-ready. The game will be played over a LAN connection, so one of us hosts the game withouth the need for an external server or any other services. Now, is it possible to me to do that without paying anything? Are there any restrictions when doing so?
Answer by Team_26 · Dec 30, 2016 at 12:01 PM
Developing multiplayer games with free version of Unity is extremely easy now, I changed my single player shooter into multiplayer game in just 1 hour.
Answer by quantumSailor · Dec 29, 2016 at 09:28 PM
Unity supports networked multiplayer in the free version, but it is a bit of a pain to properly synchronize everything and get things setup using UNET.
Here's a good link to get you started. https://youtu.be/NLnzlwCRjgc
Thanks for your fast answer! But what exactly do you mean with 'it's a bit of a paint to properly synchronize everything and get things setup using UNET'? Did you mean that it's hard to set up multiplayer in the free version? I know the basics of setting up a multiplayer game, but are there any components that I can't use with the free version?
There is now little difference between pro and free version when it comes to API. Using UNET is fairly easy, Network$$anonymous$$anager, some NetworkIdentity, some NetworkTransform and there you go for the basics.
$$anonymous$$ore advanced controls are obviously more complex but this is not only for networking.
Sorry for the vague answer.
What I meant to imply, is that the out of the box UNet solution is somewhat of a lousy tool for developing full fledged multiplayer games.
Here are things that built UNet doesn't do well out of the box: - Lag compensation and prediction - Data compression - Animation synchronization
The best alternative I've found Photon-Bolt, which, while not free, is based on the tried and true free Photon networking solution, which doesn't impose the same kind of player limitations https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41330
That being said, like others have answered here, you can build your game with the tools in place here, but just be prepared to spend a lot time fighting UNet if your game is fast paced, as you'll have to spend a lot of time centralizing and compressing your game's deltas.
Okay, thank you, but I think UNet will be just fine for my game as it's not that big :)
Answer by Yay_For_Humzah · Dec 31, 2016 at 03:26 PM
I am/was kind of doing the same thing. Here is a tutorial to make a basic multiplayer shooter in unity. https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/multiplayer-networking With the free version of unity, you can test/play a multiplayer game for free but with a limit of 20 people that are connected. So you can build and distribute the game to your family and play together, without having to complicate this and getting it all set up with Unity.
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