How do I get started with online multiplayer? (in Unity 2019.3)

I'm building a simple online multiplayer strategy game as a hobby project and I'm trying to figure out how to get started building the online multiplayer component.

Unless I'm missing something, all the tutorials I've found talk about the deprecated UNet APIs. And even from digging through the Unity official blog posts and website about the "new" Unity online multiplayer system -- everything seems to link back to the old deprecated documentation. And I cannot seem to access the APIs described in this documentation as I assume they've been removed from the build of unity I'm using (2019.3).

Are there any tutorials or documentation on using the new Unity multiplayer system?

Is the new multiplayer system accessible (and cheap?!) for a 1 person hobby project where I wouldn't ever really expect more than 5 concurrent players?

Are there other libraries I should be using instead?

Thanks!

 

That'll depend in part on what sort of networking needs you have. Is this a turn-based strategy game, or real-time?

 

Simultaneous turn based.

The game loop is like:
1) All players plan out the actions their game pieces will take next turn simultaneously, and submit (during lets say a 10 second window)
2) Actions taken by all players are simulated on the game-board simultaneously, updating the state of the game
...then back to step 1

 

OK. So are sending batches of data, rather than continuous streams like in a real-time game.

So one way to do that would be with the UnityWebRequest APIs, and a simple REST server that basically just hangs onto the latest data from each player and returns that upon request. You could write that server in PHP, for example.

 

No, and for now you can just ignore everything they say about it. Currently all it is is the FPS Sample's networking system.

My typical recommendation is Photon thanks to it having a one-time tier that is excellent for hobbiysts, and if for some reason a game takes off it can scale up to large numbers of players with no real effort on the developer.

That said what @JoeStrout mentioned would work too. There are tons of tutorials available for his approach too. Below is one based around JavaScript. You will need a virtual private server to run the server code but you can rent them for around $5/mo from companies like Digital Ocean.

https://dev.to/cemuka/making-a-rest-service-using-node-and-express-to-use-with-unity-part-1-321n