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Discussion and help relating to the PlayerIO Multiplayer API.

PlayerIO & Unity

Postby obelisk » November 15th, 2018, 4:19 pm

Hey folks,

I developed a couple projects using PlayerIO in the past (Idle Online Universe & Rise of Champions). One of them (IOU) PlayerIO's error rate and infrastructure just didn't work out for me and I had to end up basically writing my own similar playerIO service style system (less streamlined, and more custom for our own uses) on AWS. It made me appreciate more what PlayerIO was, and what it took to build this service.

I considered having to do this again for our other project, but with the death of Flash and us just starting to port the project over to Unity, it would risk the game potentially becoming inaccessible for most people by next year or 2020 with the tech war against Flash.

That said I am giving PlayerIO a chance with the Unity port, but I'm wondering if any of you Unity devs out there have run into any issues and could offer some tips on how to handle them for PlayerIO library specifically. Tips from issues you ran into for mobile? Tips from issues you ran into for webgl? Plugins that interfere with PlayerIO? Anything you're willing to share is very appreciated as it'd likely help us avoid such kinks.

-Ray
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby robscherer123 » November 15th, 2018, 10:43 pm

Hello, fellow long time Flash/PlayerIO developer here. Curious how come your can't simple use Adobe AIR for your game? There shouldn't be to much changes to do, and you can easily deploy to desktop, mobile, and Android/IOS tv devices.
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby obelisk » November 16th, 2018, 8:22 pm

Hey Rob,

Thanks for posting. It's a good question. I would have told you a few years back that it was the future and way to go for flash developers.

Rise of Champions requires a hell of a lot for its animations/drawing that would not work well for mobile in its current state. The flash portion of it has always been a downfall, and while there are better libraries for such things, it would still require a rather large re-write.
Also more importantly: WebGL.

The tools on Unity, the vast community (still growing, not dwindling like flash), the incredible amount of resources all tie in to a more sustainable engine for us. I'm extremely sad about migrating away from Flash but it is what it is.
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby robscherer123 » November 17th, 2018, 2:08 am

Ah i gotcha. Yea the dwindling AS3 community is definitely a big negative. There's not too many new articles or posts about it nowa days. I've recently started my next playerio powered MMO and was thinking about other technologies but decided to stick with AS3. As for perfomance on mobile, are you referring to the classic Flash disolay list or have you tried using stage3D via Starling. I use starling and get great performance on mobile, it blows the classic CPU powered display list out of the water.
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby qugengames » November 17th, 2018, 5:24 am

Hi Unity dev here,
PlayerIO integrates seamlessly with Unity, I'm the developer of Nukes of Bastion for Android and even though it is not an online game I have been working on a new game using PlayerIO and a set of tools I have developed in C# to make the game using PlayerIO super easy, a WinForm thag synchronizes code between server and client for you to develop on a single class and forget about the hassle of coding in different visual studio solutions. Hope this helps
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby obelisk » November 17th, 2018, 5:33 pm

robscherer123 wrote:Ah i gotcha. Yea the dwindling AS3 community is definitely a big negative. There's not too many new articles or posts about it nowa days. I've recently started my next playerio powered MMO and was thinking about other technologies but decided to stick with AS3. As for perfomance on mobile, are you referring to the classic Flash disolay list or have you tried using stage3D via Starling. I use starling and get great performance on mobile, it blows the classic CPU powered display list out of the water.


I've used starling in the past but this project was not initially built with it. The amount of reworking for this in the complex animation/battle system it uses is a rather large re-write for me anyways, and since we are underway on other ports towards Unity for other projects it just made sense to skip it. Starling is incredible but if I'm being honest it didn't connect well in the sense of enjoying the workflow of it.

qugengames wrote:Hi Unity dev here,
PlayerIO integrates seamlessly with Unity, I'm the developer of Nukes of Bastion for Android and even though it is not an online game I have been working on a new game using PlayerIO and a set of tools I have developed in C# to make the game using PlayerIO super easy, a WinForm thag synchronizes code between server and client for you to develop on a single class and forget about the hassle of coding in different visual studio solutions. Hope this helps


Awesome to hear! :) Thanks for chiming in.
By the way, love the style/theme on Nukes of Bastion. My kind of retro game.
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Re: PlayerIO & Unity

Postby Henrik » November 27th, 2018, 3:43 am

obelisk wrote:It made me appreciate more what PlayerIO was, and what it took to build this service.

Awww, thanks! :D

Unity compiles to a ton of platforms and technologies, but to me it feels like a bunch of those solutions are extremely rickety and duct-taped together, and it's a wonder that you end up with something that works at all. It is improving, and there's a ton of great people over at Unity that know how important a stable build solution is, so it's not a future worry.

So if I were you, I would try to get some sort of minimum viable thing going pretty quickly, and make sure that it works on all the platforms you want to support, make sure the whole build chain works.

And as usual, if there's something in PlayerIO that's not working, let us know as soon as possible and we'll try to fix it as soon as possible.
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