What should I use in 2020 to setup local wireless multiplayer?

I've been having a think and one thing I thought would be really nice to do which wouldn't require me setting up online multiplayer would be to get some kind of local multiplayer going over wireless ( Or wired ) internet. What I'm looking for is to let any computer that's connected to a network setup over LAN and connect to a game.

Does anyone know how I would do that in 2020? I know a lot of multiplayer stuff is deprecated but surely because it's all local I should be able to get that setup even now right?

 

If you're asking about a more 'complete' solution which takes care of a lot of stuff for you, I'm not aware of any, but I also didn't have to look for one because what I had was enough for my use case. So maybe someone else can help with that.
But if you're just looking into discovering potential servers in the network, I have an approach that I've used before. It's pretty rudimentary:
- establish a port your game will run on, or 2, or 3 ports (as a fallback)
- start the server on any device
- when players press "join" on other devices, find your local ip. Say it's 192.168.100.4. Then simply for i in 0 to 255, check if there's a server listening at 192.168.100.i at one of the established ports. This way you can collect a list of the available LAN servers.
It can be optimized, but this is the general idea.

 

Do you know of any documentation or tutorials that demonstrate how this is all done? That's the main thing for me and then I can experiment, I'm not looking for online right now, just how to do it over LAN.

 

Just start from something basics as UDP.
That will start get you going.
You can look also into sockets.

 

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/network/forge-networking-remastered-38344

Check out forge networking. We've been looking into it and it's worked really well for us.

 

I'm currently using SuperSocket.WebSocket in the server-side and WebSocket4Net for client-side (you'll use both on the same device, since your devices can act as both the server and the client). I chose WebSocket protocol because at the time it was the only way to have networking in WebGL. Don't know if that changed meanwhile.
This solution works great because you can send/receive raw bytes so you have full control over the data. It took me about 1 week to master it, but now I'm using it in a pretty complex turn-based multiplayer board game (in development) and it's a long-term solution IMO.

You also need to take care about endianness (byte order for ints, longs differ on different devices). For example when appending ints to a message (which is byte array here, Data):
ByteArrayBuilder

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.         public void AppendInt(int value)
3.         {
4.             value = IPAddress.HostToNetworkOrder(value);
5.             AppendBytes(BitConverter.GetBytes(value));
6.         }

ByteArrayParser

Code (CSharp):

1.         public int ReadNextInt()
2.         {
3.             var value = BitConverter.ToInt32(Data, ReadOffset);
4.             value = IPAddress.NetworkToHostOrder(value);
5.             ReadOffset += sizeof(int);
6.  
7.             return value;
8.         }

 

I'll have a look at forge networking again, it seems they've updated it since I last looked and even added proper documentation which is great, going to have to research it though.

Edit: Ehhh, kinda meh on forge networking still.

 

I need something a noob to networking can learn, ideally I guess I'm hoping for some up to date tutorials. I just need something I can work through that doesn't blatantly have explanations missing or even worse barely existent documentation.

Gah it's frustrating reading anything to do with Unity multiplayer.

 

Ah, well, sorry I couldn't be of help. We're using Forge right now and it's working great for us. Though I am always interested in what others are using.

 

My best option is probably to write a begging letter and get early access to connected games lol there seems to be nothing particularly reliable out there for networking noobs like me.

 

Is this what you are looking for?

https://gamedevacademy.org/how-to-create-a-multiplayer-game-in-unity/

 

I ended up using PUN 2 again and working through it, this time I managed to get through things by finding some up to date PUN 2 tutorials.

 

Why is this suddenly almost impossible to implement a simple solution for local (LAN) multiplayer?

Is there even ways to do that right now?

 

I don't know but if you find anything I'd like to see it.

 

If you still remember them, would you provide the links to those up-to-date PUN 2 tutorials here?

 

It depends on what you're looking for help with but this one seemed to work alright for me, I was mainly stuck on synchronising text but once I got that sorted everything else was fine.