I’m not sure if this is the place to post this thread, but I’m hoping to get some advice.
We’re building a virtual space station. It will host musical events, talks, classes, and also just be a very scenic spot to hang out in VR. We have amazing designers contributing their talents and we’re getting advice from NASA engineers. We want this to be not just fun but also fairly realistic.
We don’t have experience developing with game engines though and are learning as we go. The biggest challenge at the moment I believe is to either find a virtual host, that takes care of all the networking of avatars for us, like what Facebook will eventually be doing with user-created spaces, and others are working on as well. Or I’ve now learned about middleware options like Photon. Which still seem to take a fair bit of knowledge but might work for our purposes. It’s not like we’re developing an actual game, interactions (at least at first) are probably relatively simple.
Photon, like so many other options I’ve read about, are made for Unity. Unity is not much of an option for indie developers as I’m many here would agree, and Unreal I’ve heard is as good or better in many respects, for creating content for the Rift. Some of the demos I’ve tried that use Unreal are very impressive.
So my main question is, what’s the best, affordable option to host up to 100 users in a room, in VR using Unreal, that will run smoothly and doesn’t take a team of programmers to optimize? We need to be able to chat, to listen to performers on stage, we’ll have some animations but a limited amount at first. As we go along we’ll open up more and more of the station, including elevators that take you to various levels, it’ll be rotating so we need accurate gravity although for now that can just be assigned as one value per room.
I may think of more questions which I’ll post here, but for now I’m mostly just wondering if there are reliable options for this sort of multiplayer interaction that can be added without breaking the bank.
Photon is not at all made exclusively for Unity. Unity is just one out of a huge bunch of different platform that are supported by Photon. One of those supported platforms by the way is Unreal Engine 4.
For a detailed overview about the platforms that are explicitly supported by Photon, please have a look here:
I did see one comment that said Photon worked for Unreal, but I thought maybe it was a hack, that wasn’t natively supported. On the Photon site I saw nothing mentioned about Unreal support, thanks.
Is this the best option for our project? I assume it’s easier to pay for their Cloud service than trying to set up our own servers.
Well, that is the whole point why solutions like Photon exist: it’s quite a lot of work to develop a proper backend solution from scratch and it’s normally a lot cheaper to make use of existing 3rd party solutions than to pay developers for reinventing the wheel and for implementing all the low level basics themselves.
With Photon Cloud another advantage is, that you also do not have to host the Photon backend on your own servers and therefor don’t have to pay someone for server maintenance on your self hosted servers.
Also, don’t forget traffic costs. They are a huge factor and actually the main cost driver for realtime multiplayer. For example 1.000 concurrent users generate about 10 tera(!)byte of traffic per month for the average game on Photon Cloud. Feel free to compare different cloud hosters like for example Amazon or Azure and see what this amount of traffic would cost you there.
So, yeah, I would say, that Photon is quite a good option.
However as I am one of the Photon developers myself, I am of course a little bit biased.
I appreciate the biased opinion, it does sound well-informed. And I was liking what I heard about the service but since the site only seemed to brag about it’s Unity capabilities I thought I’d have to find something else for Unreal.