Oodle Network Compression

I'm currently looking into if there is a way to hook into Unity so that I can compress network traffic with a custom compression method? Even if its after delta compression for example (which is fine in this case).

I don't see anything like that in the docs, but I've heard of people doing something similar third hand.

Any thoughts? ideas?

 

You can do whatever you want to the data prior to sending it to the whichever network transport you are using, then undo it on the other side. I think it would be better if you wrote your own network transport using sockets so you can just integrate it, or modified one that was open source.

 

wwwait a second... so your saying that Unity doesn't provide a easy way to delta game objects and components and transfer that data across the network for sync across clients? Its all completely manual?

 

Unity's network solution Unet is deprecated. Their replacement isn't done yet. You could get the source for the Unet High Level API and plug in your compression algorithm so it operated seamlessly. The Low Level API would be a better place to put it though, but that is closed source. The whole solution was deprecated a year ago, never actually completed, and is notoriously buggy. So don't invest your efforts in it.

If you're looking for efficiently using your network bandwidth, which adding compression implies, you'd want to do it manually anyway. Automatic object syncing is fairly inefficient as far as network usage.

 

Ok so, since its not out yet and still in development. Might I request a method to swap out network compression methods? Call in C# whenever it needs to compress/decompress data to see if there is an override to user custom compression code?

 

You'd need to add compression in the first place, since network compression isn't included in any of the network API's I've looked at. But if you have the source code it shouldn't be too difficult. You've got me considering adding it to my own network API.

 

I don't have access to unity source code, and even if I did, that's not really a solution for anybody else that doesn't.

 

HLAPI source is posted on bitbucket.

https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/networking/src/2018.3/

I think the alpha of the new networking transport is posted on there as well. Not sure because I haven't spent much time looking at that one.

 

oooh! Thanks! And most people use this plugin to do their networking? if so, then there is light at the end of this tunnel!

 

It is deprecated and has been removed from the engine and turned into a package for 2019.1 for those still using it. It is not recommended to start a new project using it, but there are a good number of projects started before it was deprecated that I'm sure still use it.

For a new project I'd pick a 3rd party network API, or write your own using sockets.