PlayMaker News > General Discussion

How deep is the network ability in 1.3 of playmaker?

(1/3) > >>

shadowspark:
I've been wanting to get into unity and playmaker has seemed to make this a possibility, however I want to be able to develop an MMO project and so far the answers have all resulted in it being an impossible thought, however if the new version of playmaker makes accessing the network as user friendly/non-coder friendly as the gameplay I've seen created in video tutorials with previous versions, it might be possible.
But that still depends on how much network support and how extensively it has been developed in 1.3.
Would this at all be possible, or does 1.3 just have very basic network functions which would still require a programmer to develop actions for or code their own network in the end anyway?

So I'd like to know, just how extensive is the support for the network, is anything I've mentioned possible?
Or will it still be a matter of requiring a programmer?

P.S. telling me it just needs programmed actions or it's something programming that's 'easy to learn', still means it requires a programmer. I don't want to spend money on something that won't get me anywhere in the end, so please respond thoughtfully and with as much detail as possible.
I would greatly appreciate some insight into this.

marcos:
You should be able to, especially after they add the actions to let playMaker talk to Photon, which are in the works at the moment, I believe.

jeanfabre:
Hi,

 Yes, we are working on a set of actions to support Photon Networking.

 As for Unity Networking:

Support is exhaustive as far as I am aware, I think all the networking api is covered.

-- fsm variables can be checked to be synched across the network.
-- you can send events across the network ( RPC under the hood).

 So yes, everything you are mentioning is possible. It doesn't mean it's ideal just yet.... networking done right is a beast to tackle. If you don't have the necessary knoweldge required to understand what you are arequired to set up, playmaker will not help you in that unfortunatly, you will still need to grab the concepts of network view, the difference approaches to create, manage connections, etc etc.

Playmaker will take you so far into the development that even requiring the need to get a programmer to do that last action that you need to finish your project is totally worth it compare to not use playmaker to begin with.
If you start with playmaker and find yourself stuck because a particular feature is not available in the standard set of action, so what!?... get this feature done as a playmaker action, it will cost you nothing if you go through this forum and request an action ( I think you can see from the history, that 99% of the custom action requests are fullfilled): this means if the custom actions you need make sense, the community will do it for you. You can contact me even in person if you have reasonable expectations about an action that should have been there in the first place. Such action as "I want my enemy spawn, seek and kill the player, make coffee and publish it on iOs for me" is never gonna make it as an action tho :)

Actions are granular, very much like Lego bricks, you can't expect Lego to create a new brick that ressemble a car, they'll break the model down in smaller parts that "ideally" should be reusable to make other things than that model. With playmaker actions, this is the same principle. So given that metaphor, if you start building a genuine lego model, you will likely find the need for a part that doesn't exists, and you will have to make from other parts, or else mold it yourself ( = custom actions).


hopefully, this is making sense, a bit late here :)

Bye,

 Jean

shadowspark:
It's not a matter of whether or not it'll be worth it even if it requires a programmer to do that last action, it's the fact that money doesn't grow on trees as I wish it would, nor does impressive and trustworthy programmers with time on their hands that understand you and you can rely on, and in this case the first would additionally need to be true for them to have playmaker.

Besides all that though, it sounds like it is covered quite well which is a great thing to hear. And wow if playmaker works on supporting photon networking, that'll make it a beast and a half.
Not that I'm one to go on and on requesting a release date or such, but rather because I don't know whether I should risk continuing developing my project assets, etc, in-case the game ends up being unable to be completed and have wasted precious development time, does anyone have an idea of when that might be supported? Like is that a release in the far far distance, or something they are simply tinkering with, as I'll be needing to start networking as soon as possible so I know that I can accomplish it or not. And I'm just trying to workout if I should leave it for now and wait for photon networking, or just start with the networking as it is now, because I'd really need something up and running in at the very most 10 weeks, though I'd still want to verify as soon as possible whether I can get it functioning or not.
So should I try and get it now and look at the networking as it is, because photon is too far away, or will this end up eating into development time that I don't have and should just hold on until the next release with photon support? If it's going to be a few months I won't be able to wait around.

Also though this forum is trying more than most, there's still no grand amount of support or community working together to share custom actions or just in general. It would be nice if there was a stickied topic linking to all those which were complete. Either way it's still enough missing that I hope I don't ever need to ask, though the offer for support is greatly appreciated!


So I'd love some feedback on my additional questions regarding multiplayer and photon as it's really hard to try and manage my time if I don't know whats going on, any help there will be greatly appreciated, and thanks both of you for responding

FractalCore:
I was going to ask similar questions about how much you can do of networking through Playmaker. But I'd settle for some sort of quick example of networking.

I have Unity on my desktop and laptop computers so I'd love to be able to tell something to happen on one with the other. Then I can figure out what to do from there.

Right now Playmaker networking is 42 brand new actions. That's quite a daunting amount to experiment with when you have no idea.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page