What networking API should I use in 2019?

I'm looking to make a multiplayer puzzle first-person shooter and a lot of the tutorials I've come across are using unet or an even more ancient version of unity networking. Now that unet is gone what is the go-to api for making a multiplayer fps game? Just trying to figure out where to start and if there are any good tutorials or documentation on the subject?

Thanks in advance for your recommendations and help!

Rahain

 

Horses for courses. Compare them and see what fits your needs.

Sadly Unity has not provided us with a go to API.

Checkout a few alternatives to UNET:
* Photon
* MLAPI (my own)
* Mirror
* Forge

It really all depends on your needs.

 

For what it's worth, my company went down this path and we landed on MLAPI. It's very nice and the places where it diverts from the old UNET concepts are a ton more reasonable than the way UNET was architected.

 

If you need an authoritative server, storage, database access and all that good stuff I'd recommend SmartFoxServer, as I've done in other posts. It doesn't get enough love in this forum, imho, but it's a very solid solution especially for the amount of features it packs. Of course, every job needs a different set of tools. Up to you to decide which one is best for you.

my 2c

 

I agree it doesn’t get enough love.

 

You should really look at the pros/cons of all the available solutions, weigh them against your game's specific requirements, and come to your own conclusion.

For example, a twitchy fast paced FPS supporting up to a dozen players in the same match with one of the players acting as a host behind their own NAT router has entirely different networking requirements from a slow paced FPS with 100 players per match hosted on dedicated servers. Without knowing the game you want to make as well as you do, what kind of data you expect to send, what kind of latency your gameplay can tolerate, what kind of upfront or ongoing costs you are willing to pay for, what type of network architecture you are planning, it is not really possible to point to a single networking solution and say that is the one for your game.

 

I'm moving to SmartFox. Seems stable and has been going long enough to have the majority of bugs ironed out. There's also ENet which is very stable too.