Session overview: “Creating a browser-ready first-person shooter MMO in Unity presents massive gaming opportunity but also a set of unique client-server challenges. Join the developers from Aquiris Game Experience and Electrotank as they discuss the hands-on lessons they learned in creating an upcoming free-to-play FPS MMO for PC/Mac and the browser.”
A very informative session by guys from both Aquiris and Electrotank. The session started with a realtime demo of Aquiris’s FPS. The game looked fantastic, particularly their UI which they wrote themselves in OpenGL. That effort clearly paid off as the game is gorgeous! The multiplayer element seemed to work really well, with them demoing against a team of guys in another studio.
Artwork challenges/considerations encountered when making the game:
- They made a basemesh covering entire level: max 50k tris, max 30 objs, max 3k tri per obj
- Smart texturing – They limited textures to a maximum of 30 textures. 50% tileable; 25% trim; 25% unique.
When developing the game, they made automatic import tools to handle the setup of the many weapons and maps. Extensively used asset bundles and then because it was taking too long to build the project they developed their own tool to enable you to toggle which bundles should be built. Rather than storing weapon data in xml/json etc they used scriptable objects to store this info. For map details, this was stored in xml on the server, sending the client the correct map config at runtime.
During development, they had a number of networking options available:
- Unity’s built-in networking – Their opinion of this is that it’s good for small games. Nice features mentioned include the fact it’s integrated and easy to use (easy rpc calls, easy to share objects). However they believe it’s not made for thousands of players per instance. It’s good for local hosted games, but not for 2000+ players on single server.
- SmartFox – They skipped any comment on this
- Photon – As with SF, they didn’t comment on this
- ElectroServer5 – This is the solution they chose because they knew it already works well with flash. ES5 also has good admin tools. It runs on linux and is java based.
Originally the Aquiris team considered using a P2P solution for their MMO but decided on client-server for a number of reasons. They wanted a semi-authoritative server with 100+ matches per server instance and 8 to 18 players per match. During development, the networking layer was separated from gameplay by making the solution event driven.
- ES5 nodes handle realtime simulation, persistence.
- Distributed simulation / load distribution.
- Runs on EC2 – scales to meet requirements
- EUP handles matchmaking, loadout etc
- MatchNodes – register themselves with EUP. Can add/remove themselves at any point.
- Protogen (protocol engine) is described on their site as “a framework to support creating protocol specific objects dynamically via a simple declaration file. Protocol message objects (client and server) and their codecs are generated by EUP, saving developers significant time and effort.”
