David's Blog

Unity is looking better and better

I looked at it a while back (over a year ago I think), but was deep into rolling my own MMO Engine Tech Demo at the time. (And that was an invaluable learning experience)

But now for my current project ‘Asteroid Wars’, I have been back to look at it again and I have to say I am impressed so far, especially when you take into consideration external tools and services like SmartFoxServer running on Amazons EC2 Cloud. 

It’s a bit pricey at $1,200 (going to $1,500 soon) there is a free ‘lite’ version with watermarks all over it, but it is good for checking it is going to work for me and my game is viable before I part with that much cash for a full licence. Plus the range of platforms it runs on is very impressive indeed.

Of course one of Unity’s big selling points is there static drag and drop world designer, that I have no intention of ever using, which seems a little pointless but most of my ideas for games revolve around highly dynamic game worlds.

SmartFoxServer costs a bit too $2,000 for the version I might end up needing, though again I can get away with their free version for the majority of the development process, and a cheaper version while I am just dipping my toes in the water.

Part of me is sitting here thinking, “well this is all just too easy… where is the fun in this…” and there are still questions to answer, but for Asteroid Wars this particular technology stack seems to fit perfectly, so far from what I can tell.

I do like Project-Darkstar and even the thought of doing it myself (again), as I have invested a stupendafying amount of time in learning everything needed for writing an MMO engine, scalable networking, threads, sockets, delta’s and bit packing, server nodes, collision detection, persistence, various Spatial Data Structures, etc.

I even bought this book and this one while writing some of the code for my MMO Server, and I don’t normally do books. 

I have written and maintain a multi-threaded server at work that has to connect to lots of different pieces of hardware using lots of different protocols, so I am used to dealing with raw sockets.

But it does seem to integrate into the rest of my chosen tech stack far too well and be far to easy to use to just ignore. And after playing around with it all for a bit and getting some good results very quickly, I have a good feeling about the whole thing.

The Idea of using cloud technology for an MMO server as interested me since I went to a Windows Azures Seminar in Reading, for now EC2 seems the better choice though I like some of MS’s ideas for Azures.
Using the cloud will mean that even though the base point for a single server is more expensive, it’s easy to swell the number of CPUs/server nodes in the cluster very quickly in the event that more resources are needed, and equally just hold them for an hour or so and drop them if it is no longer needed. I am hoping that SmartFoxServer’s clustering has dynamic allocation and deallocation as that was one of the things I was building into my design that would allow this to work brilliantly.

So yeah I think, unless I bump into some large unforeseen issue, I have made my choice in what technology to write this with. And this weekend I want to start producing a very basic physics based flight model running in sync on two or more clients, if it can do that then I am sorted.

Considering the large range of platforms and the number of other technology’s that can be used alongside it and integrated into it with ease, I think Unity really does live up to its name.

1 May 2010 ·

• Tags
• Asteroid Wars
• Cloud Computing
• Game Development
• MMO
• SmartFoxServer
• Unity
• EC2