Realtime multiplayer games have been around for over four decades, even though their popularity is a much more recent phenomenon, and they remain one of the trickiest type of games  to develop. Delivering a smooth and responsive action for the players while hiding the latency and limitations of the network is still a major source of coding pain.

Also many games heavily rely on physics to add extra realism and interesting mechanics which in turn adds more complexity to make sure that all players are accurately in synch with each other.

With the emergence of powerful 3D engines such as Unreal and Unity these complex features have been integrated with the visual and rendering systems, hiding the intricacies of physics simulations and networking, and making it more accessible to all developers.

In this article we’re going to take a deep look at the available solutions for multiplayer action games, explore different architectures and examine the multiplayer side of engines such as Unity.

For each method we’ll discuss the pros and cons and finally we’ll propose an integration with SmartFoxServer 2X that we think provides the best of both worlds. Continue reading →