The AllJoyN awesome framework

Hi fellows,

Seems like not too many Unity devs are aware of that framework, but AllJoyN is a networking toolset made by Qualcomm, bringing the following neat features :

- enable dialog between multiple OSes (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, etc).
- Wifi Direct, aka discover any device around, and plug to it (must have access to Wifi local network though)
- Bluetooth device discovery
- separate thread, so better optimization than Unity builtin network business
- more generally, is P2P based

Unity already got some of these functionalities, but it seems like Qualcomm has deeply optimized speed in their solution (if anyone has some comparison tests, you're welcome to post it here). And most of all, AllJoyN does have device discovery, where Unity doesn't.

Right now, Qualcomm released a SDK for each OS, and a Unity plugin for Android / Windows. But they seem to struggle a bit for integrating the Unity iOS one .... So if any Unity Team member reads this topic, maybe you could start a connection with Qualcomm and help them out ?

Would be very appreciated, as iOS Unity plugin is the last missing element to make allJoyN framework a truly efficient crossplatform solution for Unity devs (so we have the same code for all platforms, instead of a iOS workaround on top of it).

You can find every info, downloads, etc, here : www.alljoyn.org
and the Unity plugin here : www.alljoyn.org/app-developers/unity-extension

Regards

 

Bumping a bit, because I heard an awesome feature :

AlljoyN will connect 2 devices if :
- they've both Bluetooth enabled
- they're both on the same Wifi hotspot
- one of them is connected to 3G

The last one is extremely powerful. That means you can find any device around only being connected to your favorite carrier ... No more need to connect to a hotspot, neither the need to stay under 3 meters because of crappy Bluetooth range ... Basically it acts as a Lobby server, without the need to have a server !

Everything is explained in this thread, and I don't understand how underrated this framework is ...

Unity sealed a deal with Qualcomm recently, so they must have heard about this project, undoubtedly

So reiterating my request to Unity team here : would anyone at Unity be able to take a few hours to help the guys finalize their iOS Unity plugin ?
Pwetty Pweaz

 

I've actually been watching this project for a while now, waiting for the unity ios plugin to become available.

Pretty sure the issue with unity iOS is not that they can't figure it out, but rather, Apple needs to grant them some special license to be able to use bluetooth on iOS devices. You can't freely utilize bluetooth as a developer like you can on android, apple has to give you special access, and it's a big process to go through.

I don't know if alljoyn just is dragging their heels for getting approved for bluetooth on iOS, or if they don't want to, or if they have tried and Apple denied them for some reason. But I really wish they would be more vocal about this because the ability to connect multiple phones of different OS's is something I really want.

 

Ah, that's a quite good theory ! Never thought about that ... Although they explicitly mentionned bluetooth not being available for iOS even in the basic package, so I'm not sure this is what holds them ? Dunno ... But yeah, like you said, they really should get more vocal.

Actually you already can with Unity
I'm testing Kinetic Damage multiplayer with my Mac my Windows, and sometimes even my Galaxy S other OSes. Just using .Net UDP broadcast to get IPs on local Wifi, and then connect them.
The only constraint is to have just one NetworkView per scene, and use RPC for everything. If you go higher than 1 NetworkView, their IDs get messed up between different OSes.

Right now the real advantage of AllJoyN over Unity is device discovery between different OSes. I didn't dig deep enough yet to have an answer, but I was wondering if it was possible to just use AllJoyN to connect 2 Unity devices, and then pass the relay to Unity builtin network features.
This would be far more securizing in term of stability overtime, because let's face it, we don't know if AllJoyN will be discontinued one day or not, so relying 100% on it could be fatal.

sidenote : Unity would litterally blow the hell out of other engines if they acquired AllJoyN, to implement their device discovery features directly. Plus, I've heard AllJoyN performances are blazingly fast.

 

Sorry, before I actually mean to say I really want to be able connect multiple devices with different OS's through bluetooth. Currently the only potential avenue of getting android to to connect to iOS over bluetooth as a game connection is through alljoyn, but it doesn't support bluetooth yet.

I primarily saw alljoyn as a bluetooth connecting framework. But I guess it doesn't really need bluetooth to still be useful if the network conection and local wifi stuff is good.

I don't see why someone couldn't make their own unity plugin if the iOS sdk has been released...

 

I was under the impression that the Bluetooth licensing wasn't going to be an issue for the new version of Bluetooth on the newer iOS devices with iOS 6, or something to that effect. I briefly looked into it for a client, but didn't get much detail.

 

Actually yes, that's what I thought too, but I find strange that Qualcomm is being so much "we don't support this yet" ...
There might be something more under the hood of their Unity plugins ... ? I admit I got no fracking clue here xD

At least they seem to have some troubleshoots with iOS version : www.alljoyn.org/forums/developers/issues-mobile-devices-not-seeing-each-other-over-network

 

Seems like there is still no support for Unity iOS :/

 

How about now? I would love to get my hands on this, I am sure we all do!

 

Lets all just start sending AllJoyn an email every month?

 

Interesting but not a real choice for me without iOS support.

 

Hi everyone,

I want to try AllJoyn for WIFI Direct feature, yet I am not able to find the plugin anywhere after the source is moved to the new website (allseenalliance.org). Could you let me know where I can find the plugin? I can only find the archive one.
In addition if you guys have any videos or tutorials about using this framework in Unity environment for Android game development, please let me know about it.

Thanks

 

I was looking for it too. I only found this:

https://allseenalliance.org/developer-resources/alljoyn/docsdownloads/unity

You can download the AllJoyn package for your OS (from here: https://www.alljoyn.org/docs-and-downloads), and inside you'll find the unitypackage (for example, I downloaded windows 7 x64 for vs2012, and the unitypackage can be found at alljoyn-3.4.5-win7x64vs2012-sdk\alljoyn-3.4.5-win7x64vs2012-sdk-rel\unity\)

I haven't tested it yet, though.

 

Flash has some really nice implementation of P2P network features; fast direct connection through LAN discovery or through free Cirrus service, netgroups, unicast/multicast broadcasting, video and sound streaming support...etc). It works across everything its Air and plugin run on... too bad it's just too slow, but its P2P really is THE reason I keep coming back to Flash and thinking what can be done with this ability.

Unity! it's a killer feature! we (er.. hopefully not just I) need P2P feature that work across all Unity targets, it would be super awesome.

 

This.

 

Does this work on ios yet?

 

Bump. Just checked this out and there's iOS source code
https://allseenalliance.org/source-code

Will this work with Unity free or do you need the pro license?

Edit: Seems to be a pretty unsupported library. The forums are dead with no replies to problems. There's no obvious manual or guide to integrating. Seems like no-one has ownership and no-one's interested in using it. Maybe Unity have something similar (they could incorporate AllJoyn) integrated into Unity 5?

 

any news here? It seems like unity plugins are no longer available

 

It was promising at the time but it's about to get superseded by new Unity networking API anyway.