Multiplayer and shadows

Hi

I own the indie licence for Unity but I would love to use the real-time shadowing of the Pro version to bring life-like quality to environments and character.

Would this create latency in multiplayer game-play tho?

I spose on start-up I could have a slider that could be dragged from low-end computer to high-end computer and the players could adjust the settings dependent on their comps processor/s speeds?

thanks

 

Shadows shouldn't be handled server side, ideally.

It would only create latency if you're running on a slow machine.

 

Shadows do add some more resource usage, however this should have nothing to do with multiplayer. You can indeed have users disable/enable shadows (or simply use the built in quality levels).

 

Do you mean that currently you're using the indie license and later you'd upgrade to pro? In that case, you might have to change some settings here and there when you migrate (I think those are not exposed in indie ... IIRC, it's both with light sources and objects: lights = type, resolution, strength, projection, constant bias, object size bias; mesh renderer (on objects) = cast shadows, receive shadows). So make sure to properly use prefabs so that this doesn't become a burden later on. You may still end up having to do some tweaking for best results but if you plan for it early on, it shouldn't be too bad.

As the others have mentioned: Unless the shadows pull the framerate down to "almost unplayable", this won't have an effect on latency. And that's unlikely to happen except for maybe a few very esoteric (and super-crappy) graphics cards (and even in that case, it's only "perceived" latency ... not really network latency that's degrading - with 5FPS it might simply take 0.2 seconds until a change becomes visible to the player).