Company Photon Neutron Developer Blog Shop

Company News

02
Sep 10

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.

Apply for the private beta now: http://openfeint.com/developers.

28
Jul 10
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.

28
Jul 10


(Click here to watch in HD directly on YouTube)

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.

22
Jun 10

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’.

Continue reading →

08
Jun 10

We are super proud that Photon was chosen by Bigpoint and the game’s developer Schell Games, a US-based studio led by renowned game designer and author Jesse Schell, to power the network features of The Mummy.

The Mummy Online - Powered by Exit Games Photon

Large scale MMOs like The Mummy Online which is based on the famous film franchise and published by the browser-games giant are what Photon is made for. As the game will be developed with Unity technology we are more then happy that Photon once more is chosen for a Unity-based game. This again proves that Photon and Unity is an ideal combination especially when it comes to huge MMO projects and real-time games.

We will work on a mini-interview with Schell and the reasons why they have chosen Photon to power The Mummy Online and will publish it here in our blog.

Stay tuned :)

31
May 10

Congrats to the guys at CMUNE - their growth rate in the past weeks is just crazy. In just 8 week they went from 200,000 to over 500,000 monthly active users.

We are pretty proud as well because Paradise Paintball is powered by Photon. Keep up the good work.

10th of April
18th of April
10th of May
30th of May		 paradise-paintball-passes-the-200000-users-mark/
paradise-paintball-passes-the-300000-monthly-users-mark/
paradise-paintball-passes-the-400000-monthly-users-mark/
paradise-paintball-passes-the-500000-monthly-users-mark/
22
Apr 10

The main feature of the new iPhone and iPad SDK is the split between Photon and Neutron. Anything related to Neutron was removed and you get an improved, streamlined API.

This release was tested against the iPad simulator, so you can be sure it is compatible. Demos that explicitly use the iPad are still in production.

We wanted to get this out to you, even though the documentation is missing. Expect an update soon.

Download here.

21
Apr 10

With the latest Photon 2.0 Release Candidate we decided to offer a FREE Edition of Photon.

Find all the details on the pricing page: http://www.exitgames.com/Photon/Pricing.

Short & sweet. Tell us what you think.

08
Apr 10

Somehow, a whole month passed since the last update. How did this happen?

After the GDC, our team did a lot of work on the server side. We finalized a Lobby application/sample and wrapped up the latest MMO Sample as well. All this made it into new Release Candidate SDKs for Photon today.

On the server side, the basic “Lite Application” is now extended by the the “Lite Lobby” application. The lobby is a new class of room that provides a list of running games and does not send join/leave events. The new LiteLobbyGame can optionally be attached to a lobby to provide it’s player count. This shows how to use Lite as basis and extend it with your own features.

The “MMO Application” is radically different from “Lite” and shows how you could use the messaging we use in Photon to build flexible and scalable interest management.

On the client side (v5.7.1 RC2), the DotNet SDK got the most samples. The Lite Lobby Demo monitors the lobby while each client can switch rooms on demand. The MMO Demo lets you simulate multiple clients in one app, which move around (r follow your mouse) and update their field of view.

Only the MMO Demo made it also into the Unity3d SDK. To see how we handle lobbies, please check the DotNet SDK.

There are lots of other changes behind the scenes and we got more performance out of the Photon Core as well. The server SDK RC1 is not supporting XP as server OS for that reason. Let us know if you need an XP version.

Get the SDKs here.

09
Mar 10

My last 2 weeks have been filled with refactoring, cleanup, splitting and documenting. The goal: liberate the Photon DotNet client libraries from Neutron and make them their own master. The result is cleaner and more up to date.

Goodbye “NPeer” and welcome “PhotonPeer”. In fact: also welcome “LitePeer”! It implements our default application’s operations and we will give out it’s source, so you can see how you could do all this yourself.

The single interface method for operation- and status-callbacks is split into two more specific calls: “OperationResult” and “PeerStatusCallback”.

If needed, you can convert your Hashtables to strings now with the SupportClass.HashtableToString method.

Many of the “loose” constant values are now arranged into enums. As easy to use but you can print out a values name and get a better impression of what’s going on. In the interface, we still use the base types int and byte, so you can use your own, extended enums as well.

The documentation is also re-done: the complete project reference is started from scratch. Most of the overview topics are refined. Of course we’re never happy with the current state.

There are many smaller changes as well. Still, it should be no real issue to update your projects. If you’re starting with Photon and DotNet clients just now: use the RC1 SDKs.

Give it a try!

PS: Unity iPhone developers: the sample requires v1.6.

← Older Entries