koobas.hobune.stream
Planning 2-4 player game for iPad; do I want / need Photon?
I'm a total noob when it comes to networking; I hope someone more knowlegeable can set me straight. I'm not going to have 50 people jumping around the room taking railgun headshots at each other or armies of units pathfinding through each other. It's either 1-on-one or 2 doubles teams and each player just controls themself.
The game will use physics mostly in a 'decorative' capacity (not needing to sync) and important motion will be deterministic, fake-physics. Keeping track of the exact position of the moveable environment parts and items is more important that keeping exact track of where the other player is.
Photon Cloud seems to be the hot thing at the moment, but the concurrent user limits and pricing worry me. I get 20 CCUs free, that means maybe 8 games could be played at any time if six are 1-on-1 and two are 2-on-2 games. That seems like very few. I wonder how many people are playing any one of the top 10 App Store games right now? $99 a year for 50 games at once isn't bad but beyond that it gets pricey fast. While it's true that if I have a lot of people playing the game at once, that means it's successful so I'm making enough money- the problem is, it's not like it's going to be a pay-to-play MMO, so my growing user base just represents a larger number of one-time payments of 70 cents, but results in bigger and bigger outlays of monthly fees on my part, and I don't like the shape of that equation. It feels unsustainable.
Maybe I understand wrong what CCUs are? I don't see why everyone has to stay connected to the server all the time, once the game is going. If I just want to matchmake and then get out of the way, is the PHP MasterServer all I really need? I understand that cheating is a huge problem because people suck. Suppose the master server randomly picked who was the authoritative one, and then told them to switch at some random time(s) during the game, and kept track of everyone who desynced, and IPbanned you if you had a suspiciously high ratio of being in the games that desynced vs the other player's? Not that I know what I'm talking about. That's why I'm asking.
I'd like to use GameCenter for as much as it can be used for, and have 3 options : host local network game, join local network game, or internet auto-match. I don't care about chat rooms or lobbies much.
After some more reading : No, I do not, because Photon networking only works on iOS Pro. Which is $3000. Which is like 30 years worth of use on their basic Cloud plan. (I'm using the iOS/ Android giveaway license now). But I've also read that Unity's built-in networking especially bites for iOS; NAT punchthrough won't work, etc. Not looking good. Why does Unity hate iOS basic users?
Yeah, I know. But it's not cool that we have to pay $3000 ($1500 for Pro plus $1500 for iOs Pro) ins$$anonymous$$d of $1100 (for just iOs Pro, $$anonymous$$us the $400 already paid for iOS Basic) and that Unity's built-in networking support for mobile platforms is sufficiently lame to make dropping the 3 grand so we can use an alternative actually seem like a good deal.
Yep I mean this is kind of logic to have some feature exclusive to pro.
I get that- Ok, I guess I'm just whining at this point; but it sucks that the -only- Pro feature I really need right now is the NET sockets support, and I don't need realtime shadows or full screen render effects or procedural materials or cloth simulation or crowds or water or terrains with trees; all that stuff that the Unity $$anonymous$$m seems to have has focused their effort into for the last 3 versions rather than better multi-player networking on all platforms (and while I'm whining, better garbage collection.) And Photon Cloud seemed a whole lot cooler yesterday when I thought it was free than when I found out it was going to cost me $3000. I guess I'll stick with Unity's standard networking + GameCenter for matchmaking and it will work as well as it works.
