MLAPI -- Unity Networking of Future Past

GameObject's arent going anywhere anytime soon, and Unity seem to be acknowledging this fact. Networking has been a gaping blackhole in the Unity feature set since UNET was depricated. Today, MLAPI was officially announced as the official networking stack of the future of Unity... until of course the future future NetCode library that is.

Link:

[shahabmos]

I went to their documentation subdomain for dots, let's say it was like going to another planet .
It took me 3 weeks and 59 a4 note pages to discover I learned a lot but cannot do sh!t with it .
Just like a college degree .

[ChrisFreeman_Bit]

I've been using Mirror personally. A lot of the old High Level tutorials work with it, or at least get you close and it does well enough for me.

[thomasfalcon]

It's quite amazing what very small teams on the Asset Store have been able to achieve while Unity struggles for years. Bolt, Mirror, Playmaker, Bakery lightmapper, ProBuilder, Amplify Shader Editor, various terrain systems and so on. Mirror developer even made Dotsnet - DOTS based networking system way ahead of Unity.

[dukemagus]

Anyone else read MLAPI and thought of machine learning?

[dukemagus]

Want to see an Unity developer swear even louder? Ask about netplay and DOTS,

[ZeoWorks]

I used MLAPI for a while, it's great.
The only issue I had was that the relay server system they had was completely broken. Expect 100% CPU usage when having 2 or more clients.
I'm sure now with Unity's official support, they'll fix all this.

[TheRealAfroRick]

MLAPI was always good stuff and its pluggable approaches are excellent. Having Unity behind it will absolutely be critical for it and Unity for the first time ever has provided a good use case for how they view things. There will be "GameObject" land and there will be "DOTS" land. MLAPI will be for people in GameObject land and so Unity will have a bifurcated approach - one for people that deal with GameObjects (i.e. most people today) and those people that want to operate at the confusing lunatic fringe performance of DOT-land.

This was smart and I'm glad they chose MLAPI. I've been using that project for a while now and it does a lot of things that just make sense. Even more importantly, Unity can ill-afford to keep pushing back solutions to wait for 'perfect' solutions that solve all the world's problems. They did it with BOLT as well and that's a good thing. Many companies just have shiz to do and they just need a supported solution even if its not the optimal solution. Kudos to them for realizing that.

[zhorky]

Basically: Unity buys in 3rd party devs to support their old crap, while the Unity devs work on DOTS/ECS

[megasupernewbie]

I started using MLAPI for my project two months ago and it was super straight forward to pick up.

[harshmudhar]

I don't think they're extending support only because of the huge delays. I don't see how people without a coding program will ever get used to ECS. Currently, designer-only teams or indies without much programming experience can still use Unity. My point being, GO architecture is still the best experience imo for more design oriented people.

[TheWoWElite]

I have used and been very happy with SmartFox in the past. Easy to get going but also scale your project.

[xtwoten]

Great video! Let’s hope we can solve Unity’s Networking together as an open source project!

- Albin

[TheRealAfroRick]

If you're going to push Photon, you REALLY should be taking a look at Mirror, and no MLAPI has *ALWAYS* been the name of the open source project.

[Neonat]

You should check out the Mirror networking framework for Unity by vis2k. It's been rather nice to work with. It's on github and the asset store.

[Nuwn]

The day unity forces DOTs is the day it dies.

3 renderers, 3 network solutions, 2 input systems, what more can you ask for...

[holthuizenoemoet]

I hope MLAPI matures a bit more, with some good tutorials from unity.

[emascheg]

Will be interesting to know why they decided to get MLAPI compared to Mirror, if u compare both solutions, will notice that Mirror is more popular have already games published on the market using it, so it shows the quality as is production ready, another think documentation/tutorials/blogs you going to found more about Mirror compared to MLAPI.
So for me i will keep stick with Mirror for a future project, on my actual is too much that became feature creep for a solo dev,

[nah]

Mentions Unity purchasing Bolt... 🤬 They buggered that up so hard, can’t wait to see how they do the same the ML-API.

[jayantbarthwal]

Does MLAPI support host migration, i made a demo scene with player movement but when host stops the game , every client came back to menu scene . That should not happen game should continue with rest of the clients. Help me

[sps]

Checkout Mirror networking on asset stores