Windows server in indie?

Hi all,

Like a lot of people in here (it seems) i'm a professional shockwave Director developer (yes, a few of us are still paid to do it!) trying to make the move to unity.
My problem is that everything I try is stopped dead in it's tracks by the limitations of the 'indie' license. The latest stumbling block is that I can't seem to do any networking, as I can't publish a server app to windows standalone and I can't connect to a local server instance.
I'm trying to get the castle server-client tutorial demo going, I've tried running it in a browser on my windows box but I can't seem to connect, should it work? Is there any way around this? (other than buying a pro license for a product I can't get anything out of yet)

please help!

 

with Indie you can not publish Windows Standalone at all.
Thats a Unity Pro feature only.

You can only deploy to windows through webplayer with a watermark

 

Wow, thanks for the quick response!

It's a bit of an odd limitation, if i were to run a web-player instance as a server in a pc should i be able to connect to it or are there some security restrictions in place?

 

You could do that. There are in-browser security limitations compared to a stand-alone executable but not that affect this situation.

 

Why an odd limitation?
Would perhaps be odd if there were a windows version where this was the case but actually the editor is OSX only at the moment, so Windows "is the other platform"

 

One difference with the web player is that your framerate will be capped at 50fps. This isn't a bad thing though, in fact I manually lower it to 30 anyway.

 

I was refering to restricting any platform support at all rather than just restricting advanced engine features. As an indie developer, while being restricted in what I can do with the engine I would still expect to publish my work to any platform unity does support, if only to test it before buying pro.
In terms of Unitys' revenue, I undertstand that the decision to restrict platform support may have been more strategical than simply 'odd'.

The reason behind my dismay is that after reading the work done by Thomas Lund in the unity dev mag these forums, I was hoping to have a windows box with SFS + unity (thanks Thomas!) to make some multiplayer shiznit.
I guess that's another thing you have to have Pro for

 

The limitations are there as a way to differentiate Indie from Pro, and to offer a suitable upgrade incentive (wanna go truly commercial? get Pro! - that sort of thing). It's something we're looking at very closely and re-evaluating as we consider Unity for Windows and the impact that will have on the Indie/Pro feature delta. I have nothing firm to add or comment about other than we're taking a nice step back to look at this all once again in order to make sure we're offering the best overall package to both Indie and Pro users.

 

Its considerably easier/cheaper to buy/rent a windows server than an OS X server.

So if i wanted to make some sort of mini-mmo -- or any other game that requires a persistent/dedicated server -- for myself and my friends i'd be a bit hurdled because i can't create a windows server with indie.

linux export would be even better for that purpose ;-)

 

I second that, Linux deployment would be fantastic. It doesn't need to be perfect, just enough for a headless server. After all, OSX is a *nix system under the surface. And if OTEE is really uncomfortable with it, they can just label it "beta", "AS IS", give it away like the master server code, etc; problem solved.

Failing that, anyone know how to manually compile UnityScript to run on a generic Mono runtime?

 

for a game server you wouldn't use Unity you would use the master server sources and create one specific to your game likely.

Usage of the networking within Unity, at least to me, only makes sense if you intend to offer hosting multiplayer session in your games. even 64 player seems to be out of its reach as the networking end does not provide callbacks to filter messages etc

that way you also do not have an probs with the platform to have the server on nor anything else actually

 

Miguel from the mono project is doing *something* like that: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Nov-14.html

 

Very interesting, you have my thanks! Now if only it worked...

Regarding the UnityScript compiler, does anyone know how to use the thing? I tracked down a mono exe that looks like it fits the part, and, after some path voodoo, seems to be responding. It seems to refuse to do anything other than print out its usage, though. Maybe I'm missing something?

And Unity is Instrument-proof, isn't it? :wink:

 

DukeOfDesmo:
Yes you can already start up your plan and use a windows server on indie, running the gameserver via the webplugin. It has no big limitations. However, this is only do-able for developing your game. The real game should just use pro's features.

You can open up Unity two times, or connect to a webplugin running a server in the BG.

So, you can do everything you want with Unity indie.

Also note that Unity 2.5 was announced to be able to create windows standalones, but don't count on this yet as there's no release date named.

However, It is encouraged to go for Unity Pro if you're already going for this whole deal anyway. It suprised me that as a professional shockwave Director developer you didn't already do so. But you'll experience that yourself .

 

Even for a "mini-mmo" (whatever that means ... mini-massively? ), I wouldn't even consider using Unity indie - that's really not what it was designed for. I'd get Unity Pro + Asset Server license and set up a really professional process with it for the many years of development time to come ... including at least one very powerful development / testing machine (it's very convenient to be able to run the editor and a couple of instances of the game clients and an instance of the server on the same machine for funky testing).

If you say "a small-scale hobby multiplayer game", it's a different story - but then you wouldn't do a persistent/dedicated server but a little peer2peer action instead (one dedicated server costs you at least EUR 50,00 / month, and you can't host database and game server on the same machine, so that's at least EUR 100,00 / month for two servers, one DB and one game server). If you need persistence for such a "peer2peer based small scale multiplayer game", you might try doing that through a Web server that has a db-backend (which should work "low-scale" in some hosted LAMP-environment).

And I agree with the others: While using Unity for the server is convenient, it's a risky thing. Currently, my server (which is implemented in that model) breaks down at around 80 players - that's very far from "massive amounts of players" ;-) ... but I'm in the optimization phase, let's see how far I can take it (and it's an action game, so going for a more RPG-style game might make things significantly easier) ;-) ... 60 players was still "pretty easy" btw.

Concerning using Web player as dedicated Windows server: I don't think that'll work that well. I know for sure that in my case, when I try to start up the server as Web player, I only get ugly crashes. Haven't investigated into that - I'm hoping to get a headless server someday soon, so I wouldn't want to go into the direction of actually adding a browser around my server ;-)