Completely new to Unity and game development as a whole and I have a couple of questions.

Hi all, I'm interested in making my own game. I have some experience with source and making custom hl2:dm maps. I want to make something of a multiplayer hunting sim, where the main goal is to bag the biggest buck, or get the most amount of kills in a set time, versus other players. I tried looking elsewhere but I have found no clear or direct answers.

How big can I make my environments in unity? 1 square mile/km, 2, 3, etc? Coming from source engine you can probably see my concern.

How far can unity render an environment without lagging, stuttering and/or downgrading the quality on a medium spec gpu(rx580/gtx1060)without it looking very pixely and blocky? I want to be able to take shots upwards of hundreds of meters away with no zoom magnification using only iron sights.

How many players at one time can unity support? I'm shooting for atleast 100 players maybe more.

Thank you.

 

Unity is capable of rendering large terrains quite well out of the box (I've personally made a 10k x 10k terrain). That said, there are some issues you will run into. The first is floating point precision -- after 3k units (meters) or so away from the origin, you will start to experience issues with this. You will need to find a solution for this (you can find them by simply googling). Next, you will need to find a way to optimize your assets both in LODs and potentially streaming of assets. Lastly is creating the actual terrain -- this can be a very painstaking process (especially since you may need to split it up). You might want to check into procedural terrain systems or something like World Creator.

With Unity you can get really nice environment visuals with just a bit of work, but there are several assets to assist with this. Were I you, I would look into at least a handful to help reduce the amount of work. Things like Enviro and Vegetation Studio go a long way to making your scene feel alive.

This is the part I think you will run into the most issues -- supporting 100 concurrent players on a map will be your biggest challenge (if even possible). Were I you, I would trim this way back (like, maybe 4?). Just to get something you can reasonably complete. Once you've got that you can try to increase that over time. I'm not very knowledgeable on this topic so others will have to chime in, but my understanding is this is no easy task.

 

Like I said I'm completely new to unity. I was considering making it so everything within 1km of the players view distance would always be at max detail and populate the maps too with trees and other terrain details. I would like to avoid having big expanses of nothing like some other large world games do. I'm flat broke and can barely afford to buy any assets or tools, and I'd rather handcraft my worlds, because I dont want my game looking similar to other unity games. 100 players is a moon shot but I'd settle for 64. What have you found to be the max players unity can support? I've heard conflicting numbers.

 

You're hearing conflicting numbers because it's entirely up to the solution you go with for networking the game. Solutions exist for everything from two players all the way up to the scale of an MMO. SpatialOS, for example, can handle thousands of players.

https://improbable.io/games/tech

 

Thank you but spatial os may not be exactly what I'm looking for. I want to let players run their own servers and I'd just handle the login credentials on my end at the master server. I want to offload as much as possible to the end user. I want to avoid an artificial end of life situation so many games go through when developers pull the plug.

 

With enough time, you could probably do it. I would still recommend coming up with a grounded goal of a 1-2KM map and supporting maybe 8 players. The best way to avoid getting discouraged is to set small goals so that you see progress and that propels you forward to accomplish the next goal, so on and so forth. I will say another challenge will be assets (trees, brush, animals, guns, etc.). Granted, you can get assets for free, but they will range in quality. You could always pick up blender and give asset creation a shot (it is free).

At the end of the day, if you're motivated enough -- you can likely reach your goal of 64 players. There are a handful of networking libraries I've seen when digging around that will help you with that -- but do not expect to come out the gate with that. You have a lot to learn and you will run into many roadblocks on your progress. Good luck.

 

Albion online is made with unity, it is very good and sucessfull MMO game, so it is doable, but i don't think MMO is good starter project.
Also, you still need to actually get those hundreds of players into your game,at all times to have this genre attractive - MMO genre is very saturated so getting so many clients active at all times is a challenge.