Through our connected games initiatives, we’re revamping how we can make networked games easier, more performant, and multiplayer-ready by default. To make these important changes, we need to start anew. That means existing multiplayer features will be gradually deprecated, with more performant, scalable, and secure technologies taking their place. But don’t worry – games with impacted features will have plenty of time to react.
Update: As promised, we have been following your feedback closely while building our new Connected Games solution. We’ve decided to extend UNet LLAPI critical support for an additional year from the original plan, to provide more transition time for developers. We’ve recently also updated our UNet Depreciation FAQs to address the concerns we’ve seen most feedback about, like transition timing. Head there to find out more (April 11, 2019).
Over the past few years we’ve offered Unity creators a set of multiplayer tools and services commonly referred to as “UNet.” UNet consists of two major components: Core networking (High Level API/HLAPI and Low Level API/LLAPI) and enabling services (Relay Server and Matchmaker). These features work together to enable peer-to-peer (P2P) multiplayer games.
UNet has been a tremendous learning experience for all of us, and we’ve seen our community ship some incredible multiplayer games.
The journey of these games hasn’t been without challenges, however, and we’ve heard your feedback: Unity game developers need more than what the current version of UNet can offer. Notably, you want more-scalable and transparent core networking and fully supported server-authoritative games that enable the security, stability, and consistent performance required for all levels of success. The future at Unity holds great promise for large-scale projects that are networked-by-default with the Entity Component System (ECS).
To achieve these goals, a complete rethinking of our real-time multiplayer technology was required. Here’s our plan.
UNet powers many active games today, and we take this responsibility very seriously. As a result, we are ensuring the following long-term support for developers who depend on our existing technology:
While UNet features are being deprecated, next-generation networking features will be made available soon, including:
For more on what we’re working on, check out our blog post on connected games. In addition to the features and services above, we’re working on a lean DOTS server runtime, and have recently added Vivox to the family, delivering voice and text chat for multiplayer games.