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Implementing SpatialOS to an existing Unity project

unity
#1

Hi,

I am working on a project that is a medical training simulation and we are moving forward with adding multiplayer. The ideal experience we would like to create is having 5 people in an instance of a scenario and doing what the single player experience would be just with 4 others online.

One concern we have with Spatial is that it seems to be geared towards games that focus on a single large world when at most we want 5 people in a single scenario and our solution would be just spawning multiple instances of our single scenario. (Think dungeons from WoW or any other MMO)

We are about 2 years onto this project off and on so we have a decent sized codebase that was originally NOT designed to be multiplayer. We understand that rewriting the codebase is going to be a big part of this task.

My questions are:

  • Is Spatial difficult to implement on something that was not originally not designed to be multiplayer?
  • If we are not making a single open world but instead more dungeon formats is spatial not the right call?
  • Are multiple deployments easy/viable to do?

I’m still new in figuring out how some aspects of spatial work so I apologize if I assumed anything or asked a stupid question.

Thank you very much!

#2

SpatialOS’ strength is in offering the ability to perform large simulations with thousands of entities in one gameworld. The type of project is probably one where SpatialOS would either be overkill, or not a perfect fit. Having said that, you could pull it off and I’ll try to answer your questions below.

Is Spatial difficult to implement on something that was not originally not designed to be multiplayer?

It depends on how well your original architecture was designed geared towards messaging as a way to change the state of your game. If you wrote all state and behaviour in large monolithic monobehaviours then it will take quite a bit of work. I do however think that this answer applies to most, if not all conversions from singleplayer to multiplayer.

If we are not making a single open world but instead more dungeon formats is spatial not the right call?

SpatialOS does not support this type out of the box. There are several ways that you could achieve this but all of them are still you in one big gameworld. You just divide the world up. See this post for more information: Multiple rooms instead of one big world.

Are multiple deployments easy/viable to do?

AFAIK, SpatialOS offers the ability to run multiple deployments of the same game. I do not know how that would work and how easy that is. Perhaps someone from Improbable can answer that best.

#3

Hey sorry for the late reply.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions! They were very informative answers