Third Party Dedicated server standalone on Photon?

Good morning, everyone!

Here I plan to create a game like "Rust" / "Arma 3" / "Minecraft" at the server level. That is to say, give the player the opportunity to open their own server, where they would store information. (Map save ect...)

I currently use Photon, everything works fine but Photon is a "Room" system and no server properly speaking so I have a problem with it.

I looked I saw that there was Photon Self-Hosted, but it's still a room system in fact and it's not what I'm looking for.

I saw that there was Photon Bolt, but I didn't fully understand how it works and I don't know if the tutorials on the internet for Photon Cloud works on Photon Bolt.

Photon Bolt works the same way in terms of code as Photon Cloud?

For the moment I would like to stay on Photon, there is a lot of tutorials and it is easy to use.

Thank you in advance to everyone who will take the time to answer me.

 

Hello,

I imagine that when you mention Photon Cloud you are referring to Photon Unity Network or Photon Realtime, that have a room system where players can join an play the game.

Photon Bolt uses a similar strategy, you can run a game host, that will serve a room to other players join. Currently, we have two versions of Bolt:

Photon Bolt Pro (contact us):

• Direct IP connection without Photon Cloud;
• Dedicated Servers/Custom Setups;
• Turnkey orchestration via zeuz.io;

Photon Bolt Free (download here):

• All connections mediated via Photon Cloud;
• No manual direct connection (has punchthrough capabilities);
• Photon Cloud CCU pricing.

In both cases, you still need to create a type of room, but by your description, Bolt Pro would fit better, as you would run the game host, and just let the players join the server by using a direct connection to it.

 

What if I want an authoritative server like Photon Bolt, but also room systems, for example if I want to make a Poker game, there will be many rooms, but also authoritative, the server do all the decisions not just one of the client.
Can PhotonBolt achieve that?
If yes, how do I make rooms in PhotonBolt, so different groups of players can connect and not disturbing other group?
Should I run 1 PhotonBolt server as a lobby and then can I run another PhotonBolt server when a client connected that serves as a room at runtime?

 

If you want authority, you usually need to run one instance of a client per room. So that's one headless Unity player per game / match. This is usually expensive, so only feasible when your game has the necessary monetization...

Photon Server is the exception. It can run many rooms in one process. The downside is that it does not run Unity, physics, etc. but the upside is you get away with less servers per players/match. This is easy(er) to scale, as you can add more Game Servers to few Master Servers. One physical machine is enough to run hundreds of matches.

Bolt can run as headless instance but we don't provide orchestration (to spin up instances per created match). So this would be something you'd do.

By now, we consider Fusion to be the better alternative to Bolt. It also has authority, can run as server, host or shared mode (with distributed authority and Cloud servers to connect to).

 

@JinPark, @tobiass @ramonsmelo, @MrMister789 hi, I'm making a game with photon(Pun 2 free version). I've completed the game and its working. But now I want to run my game on my own server (Just for the testing purpose). I've found the documents instructions but its really not helping me. if you guys have any idea how to do that (Like self-hosting or dedicated server).

please help.

 

Have a look at the docs and if that doesn't help, use the Photon Forum to let us know exactly how things fail.

Please don't tag pretty much everyone ... the thread is usually being watched anyways.

 

@tobiass what about Photon Fusion?

 

It supports running as dedicated server, if that's the question.

 

How pricing works in that case? There's "Flexible Network Topologies" section with only "Host" mode using Photon Cloud.

@Edit
Nevermind I found this thread https://forum.photonengine.com/discussion/19271/about-dedicated-server-integration .

That's pretty bad, having to pay for Photon Cloud and dedicated servers basically doubles/triples the price. The default "Host" mode I can get for free with Mirror and Epic Services.

 

Yes, Mirror has host mode but it doesn't have host migration, which we work on for the Fusion release.
It also doesn't provide seamless relay mode when direct connections won't work and you need to run some matchmaking service.
Pricing is important but should not be the only metric you look at when choosing a networking solution.

 

It provides transport for Epic services that has free relay, invites, lobbies/sessions that can be used for simple matchmaking.

Yes it doesn't have host migration but can be implemented per-case basis with Epic lobbies. The easiest solution for host migration are dedicated servers anyway.

 

I see there's still 500 msg/s limit, that was the main reason why I didn't bother using PUN. What "Contact us to lift the limit" means? Is pricing even higher in that case?

 

The 500 msg/sec limit should not applicable to Fusion. Could be a copy/paste error. There will be some limit (quotas and rates are applied on any service) but for the use cases of Fusion, this would be too low. Will look into this.

Comparing EOS with Fusion compares Apples to Oranges. Fusion aims to help you with synchronizing the simulation, achieving smooth updates for animation and physics, etc. All of that with minimal impact on performance. It's not as much about how data is being transferred. You may not need that but in our experience, transport can be solved easily but developers spend a lot of time on the logic of the game.

Epic Online Services can be used in combination.

 

Nice, it's on fusion pricing page:

Comparing EOS + Mirror to Fusion makes perfect sense. Don't take me wrong I'm very happy to see a solution that can handle a lot of players in Unity but I simply don't understand why when using dedicated servers pricing is exactly the same as Photon Cloud usage is minimal.

 

how can we make multiple session at a single instance in photon fusion dedicated server??

 

We would suggest to run a Unity dedicated server instance per session. I don't know the details but as far as I know you have to be careful to separate the sessions in a single instance and then you also need to work on your matchmaking and tracking of sessions, etc.
If you like more info, the Fusion thread is a better place to ask.