Did some Multiplayer game research!

Can anyone forsee a problem with hosting a multiplayer unity game on a server (using windows server 2012) several TB of bandwith, 128 GB of ram, quad core 2.7 ghz processor, and unlimited connections? This is an IBM server with a load of resilience in place regarding staying online.

Would the unity build be able to handle loads of players connecting at once or should a different approach be used? This multiplayer build is based off GTGD set up, however I wouldn't try to run this without an authoritive set up (which Im still learning how to do).

Edit: I guess what im asking is what are the limitations of unity concerning mass connections? Aside needing another server or instance.

 

Bump

 

Rather look into a solution that can scale up to your needs.

Check out Azure's offering. It can auto-scale server images up or down based on rules you define, and you only pay for what you need.

The problem with your approach, is you'll pay a flat rate for the server, even if its not being used 100%, and what happens if you get too many connections, or CPU overload? Players aren't going to be happy when they can't connect, and most likely won't come back after that.

 

Softlayer? Are you sure they don't scale up? Also I have heard of Azure but i thought they were virtual only an not bare metal?

 

Virtual is the way to go if you want to scale up and down quickly with minimal expense and impact.

It takes a minimum of a few hours (at best) to get a new dedicated server instance up and running, unfortunately, when your current servers are at 90% cpu load, do you have a few hours before your multiplayer servers start dropping connections and your game becomes extremely laggy and unplayable for all those online?

No, you likely have a few minutes before that starts happening.

Virtual is the way to go, its more cost effective, and much more flexible in terms of scale.

I'm not sure what SoftLayer offers, but if it's an effective scaling solution it will most likely be virtual.

 

No, virtual is definitely not generally the most cost-effective solution. The same amount of server capacity is a lot more expensive with virtual hosting than with bare metal. Virtual servers are good to quickly react to unexpected increases in your user base and to handle spikes at certain times that only last for short times, but for providing the main server capacity bare metal is a lot more cost-effective.

 

While there should be no problem running Unity on such a large machine, do not think that you will necessarily be able to take advantage of resources available without serious and significant effort. You'll be looking to find the weakest link - for example RAM isn't usually a huge problem especially once you've got a 12GB+... but the speed that you read data off of the socket or a bottleneck in your logic (e.g. physics) are far more likely to cause issues.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

I will use virtual for game testing then.

 

This was something I was worried about. I think I will first try doing a "stress test". By this I mean pushing as much as possible into a single scene among several different connections at once. Do you think that would help me find the limits of the server set up?

 

Yes. At the end of the day the only way to know how many players you can support... is to see how many players you can support. Testing can give you ballparks - the better the testing the better the results.

 

What's even more expensive, is losing customers when your bare metal solution can't provide the capacity you need.

Secondly, the OP is not asking about the running cost comparisons between the two.

 

He noticed the money part yeah money aint my issue for this.

 

Thats great. I just can only hope I can make this cost effiecient if I do start buying multiple server. Im learning the scriping for unity netowrking and plan to know it by the end of my week break. Modeling, texturing, animations, stories are no issue. Testing may tell me why I never see an online game that looks as good as kingdom hearts cutscenes.

 

So the solution is to go with a virtual solution... which is kinda like a neutered version of bare metal?

Genius!

Good luck, be interesting to see what you come up with. I suspect it'll be more along the lines of content costs... but I'd have to see the cutscenes in question.