Official Boss Room Multiplayer Sample - Early Access - Is Live!

Hello Everyone!

The small co-op sample named Boss Room that we featured at the GDC event is now available in early access to everyone! It is finally the time where you can deep dive into the source code or start extending the project, build it, and share it with your friends so that you can play together!

For more info, please take a look at how-to-get-started by reading this article.

Let us know your thoughts here on forums! At the same time feel free to join our official MLAPI's discord in case you didn't already!

A bigger Unity blog post is going to follow up shortly! Stay Tuned!

EDIT: You can access the newer and more comprehensive blog post here.

Enjoy!

 

Congratz on releasing something !

Now for the critical part... communication/documentation while bare bone, already is a mess, you're linking to an article:
- linking to another article speaking of itself;
- then 2 links to docs-multiplayer;
- and again 2 other identical links to the github repo.
The docs-multiplayer and github repo each having doc for setting up the project, each one seemingly equal and different at the same time, it gets especialy bad for the setup of photon transport. Someone needs to make up his mind and consolidate everything and remove the needless spaghetti linking.
Speaking of Photon, i have nothing against it, seems like a good product, but just why ? what about MLAPI relay service ? what about Unity matchmaking service ? Shouldn't the logical move be to make an in-house implemantation ?

Otherwise in the changelog I see that the project has stability issues for continuous and interrupted games, once resolved, can we hope for some sort of host-migration or reconnection to an on-going game ?

 

Considering this is just an experimental release and the first one at that, I guess this is expected but I would really like to see some documentation of in-house stuff like multiplay and Vivox which Unity literally owns and is used by AAA games but I have no idea how to integrate it in my Unity project.

Even we have Epic online services which is, in my opinion, the best option for us as an indie dev seeing that it's free and cross-platform but I remember a dev mentioning that these implementations will be done by the community and not by Unity themselves (I'm not a 100% sure), if that's the case then it would be just another product that I won't use in my main projects

 

Hey, sorry to hijack your thread.
Is there any chance you could pin the Mirror networking thread too?
There are Mirror questions here all the time, and our thread gets buried often.
It contains all the relevant info like documentation, discord, tutorials, etc.

It's free & open source, and mostly used by your own UNET customers.

If boss room is worth pinning, seems like Mirror thread would be worth a pin too

 

What happened to the Unity network layer? Why is this using Photon and not that?

 

Hi @Cranom thank you for your honest insights, we appreciate it. I have updated the main post with a link to the bigger more comprehensive blog post that I mention was going to follow.

In regards to the Photon Setup Guide, I can see where the misdirection was created, sorry about that. It's important to note that although the one that exists in the community repo and the one that lives in the Boss Room, are very similar - especially for the first part - the latter one is more specific to Boss Room since the project has some custom handling code for Photon Room's and Regions to automate that rather than hardcoding it.

I will communicate that to our docs team so that we can make it more obvious which one you would need to follow for setting up Boss Room correctly. At the same time, I highly encourage you to report an issue like that through the docs website directly, by hitting "Log an issue" or you can even edit the page yourself by creating a pull request by clicking on the "Edit this page" button. All these issues can be directly tracked on the docs's GitHub repo.

Firstly, it is important to mention why these features don't exist in Boss Room today, the reason being: that MLAPI does not yet well support such scenarios out of the box, since the solution is not mature enough. I can say that the SDK team is at the moment revamping major systems that will directly impact these such as Scene Management and more, which are setting the ground for future work, and the Host Migration is not yet on the SDK roadmap. With that being said, we do expect that Boss Room will evolve alongside MLAPI and will probably showcase similar features when they are supported at the core level.

Greetings,
Cosmin

 

Could someone please comment on @Cranom 's question about using the MLAPI relay for the Boss Room vice Photon. Is that an option? I have mini WAN test environment with my own servers, so using the MLAPI relay is a better option for me. Thanks.

 

Boss Room is by no means limited to the Photon transport, you can hook it up to any relay transport including the Midlevel MLAPI Relay. Please keep in mind that the MLAPI Relay is not owned or maintained by us so we can't guarantee that it will work.
Our Architecture file contains some information on how to get started using a different transport with Boss Room.

 

Boss Room is using the Unity networking layer (UNet LLAPI) for direct connections via IP Address. These direct connections are usually not possible without a relay service. Our networking service is near its end of life and we don't have a new service to replace it yet.
While we don't have a relay yet we still wanted to show you a way to use MLAPI in a listen server model where one player hosts the game. That's why we ended up using Photon Realtime to show you one way of using MLAPIs flexible transport implementation which allows you to run it with any relay service.

 

No, I was not referring to UNet LLAPI. Apologies if that was confusing. I'm talking about the com.unity.transport package.
This was supposed to be the new replacement, so I was informed.

 

Oh I see, the Unity transport package is still in development and an experimental package like MLAPI. The goal is to use the Unity transport as the transport layer for MLAPI but we weren't able to do so yet for the 0.1.0 release.

 

Thank you, good to know the transport package has not been abandoned. I really enjoy it's simplicity! Great to hear that there are plans to include it in MLAPI in the future.

 

Just chiming here in here to share that I've been digging through the BossRoom project wherever possible since ya'll launched early access. As a person who only began with Unity just over a year ago, it's been absolutely invaluable for our fledgling team to see how you've opted to set up such a variety of different systems within the up-and-coming GameObject netcode solution. We're just starting our first multiplayer project so it's pretty much perfect timing.

I'll be on the lookout for any bugs to help expedite your development in whatever way I can. Starting to get my head around this codebase

Thanks so much for putting this together!

 

I was excited to start digging into this, but disappointed to find it using Photon. Yes, I know, you keep telling everyone we can use something else. But really, it should be using something else (like Mirror, perhaps) instead of an expensive, extremely limited networking solution from the start.

I do still appreciate getting some glimpses into a working MLAPI sample, though. Some of the networking functionality already there, like the built-in object pooling, is pretty cool. Thanks!

(But yeesh...Photon? Ugh.)

 

The Boss Room uses MLAPI. Photon is used only as an optional relay service. We couldn't have used something like Mirror because Mirror is a networking solution and not a relay service. A relay is needed when you want to connect clients together without the need of dedicated servers. This is the case for MLAPI, Mirror or any other networking solution

Also you can use MLAPI with other relay services. For instance there is a transport using the Steamworks networking which is a free relay service for games launching on Steam.

 

So, for clarification...
I can use MLAPI instead of Mirror? Both are networking solutions?
And I can use MLAPI to create a server project, and a separate client project, have the server project hosted somewhere as a dedicated server, and the client project connect up to that...just using MLAPI? No Photon or other relay server needed in this situation?
But if I wanted to have an MLAPI client+server all-in-one project (like this sample) I would in that case need a relay server in order to properly get different clients connected together, hence the use of Photon for that purpose in this sample?

 

Yes exactly, everything you said is correct. MLAPI and Mirror are both networking libraries. MLAPI supports a model where you self host dedicated servers. There is no Photon or relay server needed if you have dedicated servers. You can connect directly to the dedicated server via IP. This does not work if you want your clients to host a game themselves unless they open ports and the firewall. So if you want a convenient way to have a client hosted game where anyone can easily host a game, you can use a relay like Photon with MLAPI.

 

Awesome! Thanks for the clarification.

 

Boss Room - Early Access - 0.2.0 is here!

We are thrilled to announce that today a new version of Boss Room has arrived! In the past month, the team has delivered new features, optimizations, and numerous fixes and changes including the following highlights:

• Updated and introduced various hero abilities, such as Archer’s PowerShot which accounts for a duration that a key is pressed for or Rogue Dash that teleports the player to a target spot - to learn more about how to handle teleport-like abilities in a networked environment, please check out the DashAttackAction.cs - as well as Implementing a better cooldown solution and calculations.
  
  
• Introduced static scene NetworkObjects, as well as implementing a ScriptableObject based event system to encapsulate events inside assets.
  
  
• Increased the overall GPU performance of Boss Room by disabling GPU Skinning, enabling GPU instancing, turning off Cast Shadows for various prefabs, and more optimizations.
  
  
• Updated the user interface in many places and refactored the Action Bar code to increase the extensibility without the need of having to manually modify the code in multiple areas.
  
  
• Updated our GameNetPortal to properly handle Per-Connection state on client disconnect and Player connection if they experience a game-level connection failure - you can check out the ApprovalCheck function in our ServerGameNetPortal.cs.
  
  
• Fixed various known issues from the previous release.

For the full changelog, please take a look at https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/com.unity.multiplayer.samples.coop/releases/latest

Let us know your thoughts on this update in this thread!


Enjoy!

 

Hi, launching several instances of the built executable in order to both host and join a game triggers ConnectStatus.LoggedInAgain: "Connection Failed You have logged in elsewhere using the same account."
Is there a workaround?

 

First time exploring new Unity networking and this boss room. I get "Invalid state for this operation. The player is already signing in. tip: You can still use the Direct IP connection option." This running from Editor and from Windows build.

 

@SoftwareGeezers
This is the same problem as above, you can use the -AuthProfile option.

 

When I press the create button to create a lobby nothing happens. I made builds for mac and also in the editor but both just show the loading for a split second and do nothing. I downloaded the project from https://github.com/dilmerv/UnityMultiplayerPlayground and made multiple build instances and I was able to have a local server and local clients but I can't seem to get past trying to create a lobby for the Boss Room Multiplayer Sample.

 

Chris, should WebGL builds of BossRoom 1.3.0-pre be able start on ips other than 127.0.0.1 (and/or be able to connect to other hosts). My Windows and Linux builds run and network together just fine, but the WebGL build I put on the server today has the aforementioned property no-connect-o. Is that expected? Also, of course, redirect and/or flame me if this is the completely wrong space for this. Thanks

 

Well okay then -- glad things are working as expected. Just for the record: The WEBGL builds can NOT connect as client, out-of-the-unsupported-box (even to a host on windows or Linux happily accepting non-WEBGL connections.). I haven't done any real digging, but wanted to offer that small result for anybody interested. Love the BR btw -- nice work and ty all for creating it!