Question Networking library for API built with PHP?

Hello

Some background:
I am working on a 2D multiplayer MMORPG game (top-down graphics). Because I am a web developer with 15 years of experience (and I built similar game in the past for web) I started building this new game with Angular/Ionic/Capacitor (front-end stack that allow to compile/release for the Web, Android and iOS) and PHP/Laravel + NodeJS for the back-end API.
The project is in quite advanced stage already - amongst other things I have the networking part almost ready, but more about it in a sec.

Now comes the tricky part
Few months now I found out about Unity and fell in love with it!
So my idea now is to rebuild the front-end with Unity to make the game more appealing.
At the same time I do not want to throw all my hard work away so I would love to keep the API as I have it and communicate with it from Unity.

To give you some details about how I plan to communicate with the back-end (MySQL + Redis):
1) HTTP requests for things like:
- loading location data with GET, when player visits them
- sending a POST when user crafts an item or buys something from the shop
etc.
2) WebSocket communication (via NodeJS) only for:
- sending move requests
- syncing/displaying other players on the map, as they move

The game will be a crafting / mining / trading focused so I do not care if the players will not see themselves super-accurately on the map as they move, it's enough for me if they see other players around.

The way it works in my Angular implementation is:
- user clicks a location in the map
- client calculates the path to get there (player location in the map is grid-based so while they are animated pixel by pixel, the location on the server is saved as world coords (X,Y))
- calculated path is sent to the server so other players are notified of the movement
- the server updates the players position every X ms (when s/he is supposed to get to the next tile) - this is to prevent cheating, but that is irrelevant here, I guess
- if a player clicks another location before reaching current destination, new path is calculated from the point s/he is currently and that gets sent to the server, and in consequence to other players

Quite simple, but since I do not have much experience with Unity/C# (yet ), plus I always prefer to not re-invent the wheel my question is:
Will any networking library such as
- NetCode for Game Objects
- Mirror
- Photon
help me?

Or should I simply go with UnityWebRequest + Socket.IO from asset store?

Thank you in advance!

 

Netcode for GameObjects and Mirror and Photon Fusion need you to run your server as a Unity application so if you want to run a server using angular they are not an option.

If you just need something to handle web requests and low level messaging using websockets using just UnityWebRequest and a websocket implementation is the way to go.

 

Hi Lukeesta

My server will be based on PHP + Node.js, not Angular, but I understand it was a "typo"

Thank you so much for your reply. I thought this was the case, but it's always better to ask and confirm. Thanks!