In case you missed the news, OpenFeint just announced some awesome new cross platform multiplayer tech, PlayTime.
It’s FREE and launching later year. You’ll get:
Easy-to-integrate multiplayer
Voice chat technology
Casual and Hardcore versions
For Casual Games: Give people a reason to laugh and play. All you need is a high score and you can transform your game from single to multiplayer in just a few hours.
For Hardcore Games: Build the hardest of core multiplayer games with some advanced tech we’ve created in partnership with Exit Games. You’ll get a socket-based cross platform server, support for up to 16 player server authoritative games, a lobby & matchmaking.
We just released a new developer tutorial on our download page which extends Photon to buffer objects inside a room and update clients with their type, position and rotation.
This one is especially interesting for everyone using Unity3d as it’s client side is Unity-only. Of course you can learn a bit from it for any Photon-supported client type and server development.
After the Photon 2 release, we got great feedback, tweaked our code a bit and added more documentation. Today, we want to give you all an update of Photon socket-server, the MMO Demo package and also a fix for Flash clients.
The MMO Demo v2.0.5 implements proposals that emerged in forum discussions with our growing community. If you haven’t yet, join the dialog with Exit Games and help us shape Photon. Some of the changes: You now have access to actor interest-areas and items. Vectors are serialized to float arrays for sending and Items now use ICoordinates in the constructor, which removes the need to use Vectors there.
The Photon Server SDK v2.0.5 now includes a 64bit build for WinXP and Win2003 servers. Photon Control now indicates when it’s busy (waiting for service start) and of course we updated the binaries of the MMO application (up to date with the MMO Demo source).
The Flash SDK v5.5.1 includes a crucial fix for the server timestamp, which did not show a valid value when the server’s time had an overflow. Now it shows the approximated timestamp in all cases.
What were the reasons to use an online game engine/network middleware?
Matt: The use of middleware let us leverage someone else’s expertise. It got us up and running faster, and leaves us more time to focus on making a great gameplay experiences.
What were the main reasons to choose Exit Games Photon for “The Mummy”?
Matt: First, Photon’s proven Unity support. We’re using Unity for ‘the Mummy Online, so this was a must-have. Second Photon’s use of C# allows us to use the game scripting language on both the server and client. Third, the support of reliable UDP also a must-have for any MMO. And lastly, Photon’s pricing made sense.
From your point of view: What are the advantages of Photon over its competition?
Matt: We evaluated other products, but found Photon’s feature to be the best fit for our needs. The combination of: UDP, binary sockets, C# to write the server code, plus a great Unity SDK, was hard to beat.
Thanks Matt!
Matt Mahon is Technical Director of Schell Games which is developing “The Mummy” MMO for Bigpoint.
This video gives you a short introduction to the MMO Demo for the Photon socket-server. It shows how to merge the Unity Island Demo into our package, compile and start the windows client to create some simulated players before you finally visit the tropical island inside Unity. See how you move the simulated players around and how to modify the view distance.
You do need to have the Photon socket-server installed locally, of course. How to do this, our How to Install Photon video will show you – in even less time.
We really had a great time with all those release candidates recently but ultimately we all knew this was going to end sometime soon. This time is now.
After fixing all known issues, Photon v2 is finally declared stable!
As usual for releases after an extensive time with RCs, this has only a handful of changes: Creating operations became one step easier (no PopulateParameters anymore) and more verbose in case of errors (all get listed now, instead just the first one). There is more documentation (photon-getting-started.pdf, photon-configuration.pdf and in Lite code) and even PhotonControl got a few updates.
In the near future, we will lower the entry barriers and extend the current package.
(Click on the video to watch in HD directly on YouTube)
Here is another tutorial video. It shows how easy it is to get the Photon socket-server SDK for Unity 3D running. Just download it from our website, unzip the files, edit the Unity Scene file (to change the server to your local IP) and it runs. And all it takes is just about 2 minutes. You do need to have the Photon Server installed locally, of course. How to do this, our How to Install Photon video will show you – in even less time.
(Click on the video to watch in HD directly on YouTube)
Downloading, installing and starting Photon is a matter of just a few minutes as you can see in this clip.
You will see, first steps are incredibly easy and will take only about two minutes to run your own socket-server!
Many more videos are to follow – in the meantime, don’t hesitate to let us know what you think.
Online Features of Massively Multiplayer Game (MMOG) ‘The Mummy’ Will be Developed on Top of High Performance Socket Server and Development Framework Exit Games Photon
(Portland, USA) – June, 2010 –– Exit Games, the leading provider of multi-platform online game engines and services, today announced that its network engine, Photon, has been selected by the global leader in browser-based gaming, Bigpoint (http://bigpoint.com). Photon was chosen to power the online features in a game based on Universal’s hit film franchise ‘The Mummy’.
With RC4, Photon today takes a leap toward the v2.0 release. We streamlined the logic, cleaned up code and namespaces and tracked down all known issues from RC3.
Most notably we tackled the issue on some machines, where Photon ceased to send events from one player to any other after a few seconds, independent of the amount of data sent. This is fixed. Aside from this and some more, clients are now disconnected when their sendbuffer is full. This can be adjusted with the config settings to some degree but in general helps avoid bigger problems.
Also new is that the MMO Demo has become it’s own package. We hope it’s easier when server- and client-source for this complex application are in just one package. The Photon Server SDK only includes the compiled MMO Demo to run it by default and upcoming client SDKs won’t include MMO clients (but still do).
As we are getting closer to a v2.0 release (without the RC ending), we added documentation. If you used RC3 before this, make sure to check the upgrade guide in the SDK.
