Third Party Alternative to photon fusion?

Last month I posted a question regarding what networking solution should I use to implement a networked projectiles in my TPS game (90% of the projectiles are with rigidbodies).
A lot of people recommended fusion but as I am developing with fusion right now I find it hard to get answers / help and I it makes me lose my confidence with development (i know multiplayer games are hard but help is great ) and I found out that alot of games made with fusion tend to rework their networking backends because it is not affordable. Can someone suggest an alternative ? I am thinking of fish networking but since it is too new I might also have a problem with resource availability.

 

Are you connected on Discord? Usually you get the most help there. And it gives you an indication of how likely you are going to get help just by looking over the discussions of the past couple days. Is there more questions than answers? Do users get help even for advanced questions, or is it just beginner-level stuff?

Anyway, I tend to say that Fish-Net is a great choice but so is Netcode for GameObjects if you can live with the fact that it has fewer features. Both solutions are open-source and free to use but there are some paid services too, like Unity Gaming Services if you want Relay, Lobby and Matchmaking.

Look at both, maybe try their examples, look through the docs, join the Discord, and then decide. You can't go wrong with either choice and since you're unhappy with Fusion, those really are the most sensible remaining choices based on my observation what users tend to choose these days for new projects.

 

I will try connecting with their discord server from now on ! Right now I am just posting on their photon forum which has an active moderators but doesn't entertain answers that might be already in their game samples ( I know this is majority of my fault but a more active / friendly community would surely boost developers confidence )

 

FishNet is free and competitive with Fusion. I don't recommend networking projectiles simply because it's usually a waste of bandwidth, but FishNet can do it.

There's 'predicted objects' in FishNet to keep rigidbodies in real time.

Here's the link of you're interested https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/network/fish-net-networking-evolved-207815

 

Hey, thanks for reading my questions.
My game relies heavily on networked projectiles since my game doesn't have any futuristic weapons that hit instantly.
They may curve, bounce and arch. Does fish have a downloadable sample projects that deals with server authority and networked rigid bodies?

 

The Fusion forum isn't very active. When Fusion launched, we already used Discord and (funny enough), there is now a Discord "Forum" channel for Fusion, too.
Anyone with Photon and Discord accounts can join easily via our Profile page. Just in case that's a hurdle.

 

hey tobiass ! I will try the discord forum from now on too ! Are there also any chance I would get from unity forum (regarding photon fusion) ?

 

It gets a bit fragmented easily. At the moment, Discord is definitely the focus.
We don't monitor the Unity forum this actively but there is a Fusion thread which you could use to ask questions.

 

Okay, Thanks looking forward to the channel !

 

Since you were asking about projectiles. We have a sample that explains how to do a number of different projectiles correctly in Fusion: https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/fusion/current/game-samples/fusion-projectiles

 

Fusion does not support UWP. You should know this because they don't say it in any product comparison and it's a big NO NO for many of us.

 

We could look into UWP support but so far, it's not been requested frequently. As far as we know, it's mostly in use for Hololens 2?

 

every single Microsoft Store product is done in UWP. So if you can download from Microsoft store, that means it was done in UWP. This means, things like Adobe products, Dropbox, and tons of other software is already in UWP.

In my case, about 1/3 of the user base gets all updates and games from the Microsoft Store. From what I see, photon fusion should be able to support it by just updating the nanosocket library that is compiled without UWP support.

 

Thanks for the insight. I was aware of the MS Store but didn't know how much it's in use.
And yes, providing a nanosocket lib for Fusion should be all that's really needed. I pinged the team about it.

 

thanks a lot, please let me know how long do you think that would take. I see you already did it for webgl and other platforms (the nanosocket) and in theory it should not be very hard to port it to UWP since it is a very small library.

Also if it helps you prioritze, here are some stats... the largest sold software on the store are Games, a factor of almost 8 times more than the next. It's the first long line.

Microsoft Store number of available apps by category 2022 | Statista

 

We don't set ETAs. It's planned for the next version of Fusion but it's unclear when that releases.

 

thanks

 

well, i need to at least have a guestestimation because if this is going to be a 2 months wait, i can just port the whole thing to Fishnet in that time period instead of waiting. When you mean next version, you mean from 1.1.5 to 1.1.6 or to 1.2.0 ?

 

Will DM you. Need a little more context.

 

Question. Fusion also seems to use a relay always for server hosted Fusion games when connecting with a WebGL client, why is this? Considering Fish-Net for this reason.

 

Afaik, you can not easily host a session in WebGL because you would need to accept incoming WebSocket (or maybe WebRTC) connnections in your browser. Also, the moment when the host changes to another tab, the session would be over for everyone.
So you need to run dedicated Unity instances as server but Fusion instances currently don't support incoming connections via WebSockets.
This is why Fusion WebGL exports run via relay.