Photon References Developer Contact Shop Blog

February, 2011

24
Feb 11

Exit Games, the leading provider of network engines and Unity Studios, sister company of the leading 3D platform provider Unity, today announced a partnership to introduce the perfect product tandem for MMO game development with Unity: Legion and Photon.

Legion provides a powerful MMOG development framework for Unity developers, which is perfectly complemented by Exit Games Photon. Legion will provide an extension of the Unity editor, and seamlessly integrate easy-to-use MMO development tools with the existing Unity work-flow. With Legion the developer can concentrate on making great games, and let Legion deal with the complicated build processes and maintenance of MMO servers, client code, and logic behaviors.

Photon is a fast, reliable and powerful socket server and high-performance network engine for multiple gaming platforms. Photon is built on native C/C++ and features Reliable UDP for ultimate speed and performance while custom server code is written in .NET/C# which makes it an ideal choice for Unity-based development.

Legion and Photon together form the market’s most powerful and easy to use combination for MMOG development with Unity.

Lars Kroll Kristensen, Technical Director of Unity Studios states “Having researched the market for MMO packages, I found that Photon from Exit games was the perfect match for Legion, and that these two in tandem provide the best possible tools for MMO development with Unity.”

“Building an MMOG is a tough challenge and developers should choose their tools carefully. Legion from Unity Studios plus Exit Games Photon is an ideal combination and the most powerful tool-set one can find to build stunning MMOGs,” says Christof Wegmann, CEO and Founder of Exit Games.

Developers interested in implementing Legion and Photon in their Unity-enabled games can contact Unity studios at legion@unity-studios.com or legion@exitgames.com.

Exit Games Photon Free licenses for Unity, iOS, Android, Flash, Silverlight and other platforms can be downloaded at http://shop.exitgames.com.

24
Feb 11

We just released new Photon Client SDKs for DotNet and Unity. Version 6.2.0 includes several small updates and tweaks:

The documentation should now be a bit clearer where we use Photon (in general) and where the Lite Application (our server application for room-based games). We added a few values to enums and updated the descriptions of most. Security exceptions on connect are fetched and handled, the PhotonPeer.PeerState now includes a “Initializing” state and is of type enum PeerStateValue. The OpLeave method now has an overload without the room-name parameter (which is not used server-side currently).

The main addition to the Unity Photon SDK is a new Demo: Please welcome the “Lite Lobby Chat Demo“! It shows how you can use Photon’s Lite Lobby application without any server-side programming. It also contains a PhotonClient MonoBehaviour, which should be a viable starting point for your own client development.

While we were at it, the Unity Realtime Demo also got an overhaul and should be cleaner and better documented.

Get the new SDKs here.

21
Feb 11

Chris and Tom would like to invite all of you to drop by our GDC booth
which is located at Unity Technologies #1416.

We have great news and demos with us, e.g.:

Unity Studios & Exit Games: learn more about our cooperation withUnity Studios and how this is related to MMOG development with Unity

OpenFeint’s Playtime & Photon: hear what Exit Games Photon does for this amazing cross-platform multiplayer technology and how we use Photon’s Cloud Power-Up for it

Please get in touch at gdc2011@exitgames.com to arrange a meeting with Chris and Tom.

15
Feb 11

In the Photon Server SDK v2.4.7, we’ve got two major changes:

The MMO Application got fix for item subscriptions in some cases. There has been a discussion about this in the Developer Forum, so check there, to find out if you were affected.

We updated the Photon Core (PhotonSocketServer.exe) with a fix for a potential deadlock when a client’s address changes. This happens on some routers and was leading to a standstill. Also, we now check for the available DotNet framework and log out a warning if 3.5 is not present. Check the logs, if Photon does not start on any machine.

Get the download on our page.

11
Feb 11

We just released another bugfix release for the Photon Server SDK. The main reason for it was a pretty sneaky issue with DotNet 2.0 and config files.

On some machines, it looked like the license server wasn’t available on start and Photon shut down immediately. Other machines (starting at the same times) didn’t have that issue. After a while we found that the logs were also kind of truncated and became suspicious of log4net but we couldn’t find why it work. In fact, we didn’t find changes since last year, when it all worked nicely.

Thomas finally found out that all this happened only on DotNet 2 runtimes. An undocumented “feature” in that runtime gets creative when looking for DotNet config files. It not only tried “PhotonSocketServer.exe.config” but also “PhotonSocketServer.config” and even “PhotonSocketServer.exe.local”. So when we recently renamed our config to PhotonSocketServer.config, we gave DotNet 2 a reason to dislike this config file and the logging issue prevented us from noticing this. Best of all: The config was only used when a license tries to contact the license monitor!

Long story short:

We renamed the config file once more (sorry for that!) to PhotonServer.config in this release. There are also minor fixes in the MMO Application.

Download the SDK from your page.

← Older Entries