Question Which networking solution to use????

Sorry to ask this here. I'm sure this must have been asked a lot of times but I've just spent a few hours searching and can't find any up to date, useful information.

There seems to be a lot of options for networking and I need to find the right one.

The game will only have 6-8 players. It's VR, so for each player I need 4 positions (world position, head and 2 hands). They will shoot fireballs at each other, so there may be lots of them on screen to track too.

Other requirements-
-Needs to work cross platform on andriod and PC.
-VOIP (not sure if any of them cover that too)
-Scalable. I want to start with a simple peer to peer, but be able to add dedicated servers and cheat prevention later if it gets big.
-I'm new to networking so something not too hard, and with lots of tutorials would be good.
-Cheap or free. I'm poor.

 

Just download Mirror and PUN and make a basic VR game with both. Two players that can join a room and see each other move around. Then you'll know the basics of each and can make this decision on your own.

For bonus points also try NormCore and Photon Fusion.

 

I'll look into NormCore. Seems more reasonably priced than Photon.

Is there anything that will let me use a listen server at first, and change easily to a dedicated server later? I think that's what I'm looking for.

 

Gonna be way easier to do server authoritative from day one.
You can still have player hosting though, even free.
For example, Epic Online Services has a free relay so you won't need port forwarding.
As for VR, Population: One was made with Mirror