Where should I start learning if I want to make a multiplayer game in 2019?

Ideally I'd like to make a test FPS scene. What's the best route I should take nowadays? I hear lots of names tossed around (uNet, Photon), I'm so confused.

I'll share what I've found so far:

- Expressed Unity (2018): I found this series searching on these forums, but nobody ever commented on his thread....the series looks very nice and apparently complete. My top choice so far. Uses Photon.

- Photon Official Tutorial: Text based tutorial, looks great too. Also one of my top picks.

- Brackeys (2016): Too old? Maybe I'm wrong. Uses uNet.

- Brackeys (late 2018): This one requires downloading a huge project. What if I just wanted to move, shoot cubes and build from there? I'm not much of a fan of boilerplate projects and would prefer avoiding them. Looks amazing though.

- N3K EN (mid 2018): (I think) Only shows how to make a lobby and save player stats on MongoDB. Doesn't cover what I'm looking for perhaps.

What scares me about Photon are all the comments/threads about the pricing and message limit, but also read that the API is way better than uNet.

 

Are you new at Unity? Networking? both? if you are new at Unity then I would recommend first learn some off-line games to have a grasp of the UI and how Unity works. If you are new to networking in Unity then yeah, I would suggest learning photon.

Just don't overwhelm yourself with huge tasks. Work in small tasks during the day.

 

Unet is being discontinued so totorials involving it won't be very usefull .

 

Like I've been mentioning lately there is a community driven fork of Unet known as Mirror. It's an open source easy drop-in replacement with improvements and bug fixes but most importantly it's no longer dependent core functionality included in Unity and thus won't stop functioning when they officially discontinue Unet.

For someone new to multiplayer game development both Mirror and Photon are excellent choices.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/mirror-networking-for-unity-unet-replacement.425437/
https://github.com/vis2k/Mirror

Just a quick heads-up concerning this. The video is showcasing Unity's FPS Sample which has multiplayer but is based off of the hybrid mode of Unity's ECS framework. I haven't taken the time to look into the project too deeply, but I'd recommend holding off on it until you're ready to tackle ECS.

 

Is Mirror Better than Photon, I want a game where people can randomly join open matches and fore private ones they need a passcode. How hard would that be on mirror, I’ve used photon before and had some success on it

 

This thread is more than a year old now and my opinion is no longer the same. Use Photon. Mirror has entirely too many problems to make the limited features it has worthwhile, and any effort spent adding features would be far better spent creating your own solution running on top of a networking library.