Comparison of Client-Server Solutions in the Development of Massively Multiplayer Online Games on Unity

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of the traditional approach used to create a multiplayer game in the Unity real-time interactive application development system, especially in the case of a large number of concurrent users. As a hypothesis, an alternative option, which is not common, but which solves many of the problems of the previous approach, is proposed. Two client-server solutions have been compared for developing multiplayer online games in Unity, and the advantages of both approaches have been described for different cases. A game development architecture using a more up-to-date method is proposed: instead of the Mirror library, a standard toolkit for Unity development, microservices written in Golang are used. We present solid proofs of the preference of the alternative approach, the main advantage of which is the support of modern architecture providing high-speed communication between microservices, supported tests on messaging on different platforms.
 The test results confirm the hypothesis put forth, and we can conclude that the Unity bundle with Golang is more effective for multiplayer video games.
 The article also contains basic methods for debugging multi-threaded application in Golang bundled with Unity game development system and suggests a technological method that allows to get a fast way of data transfer between the client and the server.