koobas.hobune.stream
MMO multi-levels
Hi,
we are trying to develope a mmo based game and there are some concers we are worried about.
Our main concern is about how to manage the missions in the project. We dont really know if we should split the whole world in different missions (lets say, The Hall, The Dungeons, Cities, Indoor environments...) or put everything together in one mission, load it at the beggining and use "teleports" to move around.
Knowing it is going to be fully on-line, is it possible for unity as a server to load two missions at the same time?? (ie: if two people are connected to the same server but they are in different areas).
If the world must be built at once in the same mission, would the streaming loading be the best way to load the world?? Does it work that simple??
In both cases, do we need a third party software to admin the server??
Thanks in advance for your help!!
While it is possible to use Application.LoadLevelAdditive to have multiple scenes loaded in parallel, I doubt that running Unity with multiple loaded scenes as the server side of an MMO is going to scale well enough for any reasonable definition of "Massive". You'd probably want to write a custom server instead, or look into ready made MMO server solutions, such as SmartFoxServer (which I have never checked out myself, but I know it has some ready-made support Unity).
smartfox server is not a real $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O server for realtime games. netdog and photone are the real options. smartfoxserver is a HTTP based slow server for chat and turn based games.
On the client, this would normally be handled by Application.LoadLevelAdditiveAsync. You would split your level into small areas and load and unload the areas around the player. Your server would be implemented independently of all of this.
you can use netdog or photon for server solution. photon has different pricing options. it's free for less than 50 CCU and just $1500 for unlimited users at the same time. netdog is a better solution but with a higher price of $30,000. you can crate netdog with photon but netdog has much of the functionality needed. photon is a good and fast socket server with the ability for scripting using C# so you need to create the functionality yourself. they have examples and good source code/tutorials to start with. big world has a great server for MMOs and they have a client too.
I can't vouch for the usefulness of Photon, but it does have variable pricing, including free/low for indies: http://photon.exitgames.com/Photon/Pricing
