BetterTogether 0.8.0

BetterTogether

BetterTogether is a simple multiplayer library targeting netstandard2.1, .NET 6, 7 and 8. It is heavily inspired by Playroom which is pretty good and available for most web frameworks/game engines. While Playroom has a Unity SDK, it only support WebGL builds of Unity (for now at least). This project however should run on any platform that supports Net Standard 2.1, .NET 6, 7 or 8.

Features

• Simple API
• Support for RPCs
• More to come (hopefully)

Installation

Get it from NuGet or build it yourself.

dotnet add package BetterTogether

For Unity, use this link in the package manager https://github.com/ZedDevStuff/BetterTogether.git#unity or NugetForUnity which i recommend solely because you can independently update the packages in case you need to.

Usage

Setup

using BetterTogether;

// Setup a server using the fluent API
BetterServer server = new BetterServer()
    .WithMaxPlayers(2)
    .WithAdminPlayers(true) // Allow the server to have admins
    .Start(9050);

// Seting up a client without the fluent API

BetterClient client = new BetterClient();

// Fired when the client is connected to the server
client.Connected += (id, playerList) =>
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Connected as {id}");
    Console.WriteLine("Players:");
    foreach (var player in playerList)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(player);
    }
};

// Fired when another player is connected
client.PlayerConnected += (player) =>
{
    Console.WriteLine($"{player} connected");
};
client.Connect("127.0.0.1", 9050);

State

Objects need to be MemoryPackable. See MemoryPack

// SetPlayerState is used to set a player state. Only the player or the server can modify this state
client.SetPlayerState<string>("Username", "Player1");
// SetState is used to set a global state. Every player can modify this state
client.SetState<string>("foo", "bar");
// Returns the latest state of the key available on this client
client.GetState<string>("foo");
foreach(var player in client.Players)
{
    Console.WriteLine(player, client.GetPlayerState<string>(player, "Username"));
}

RPCs

// Register a RPC
client.RegisterRPC("Hello", (args) =>
{
    string message = MessagePackSerializer.Deserialize<string>(args);
    Console.WriteLine(message);
});

// Call a RPC on every client but this one
client.RpcOthers("Hello", "Hello, World!");

Packets

BetterTogether uses a simple Packet struct to transfer data. If you want to do something on the server with them, you can do so like this

public Packet? HandleData(NetPeer peer, Packet packet)
{
    // Do something with the packet or return null
    // Returning null will discard the packet
    return packet;
}

server.DataReceived = HandleData;

Unity support

Unity behaves differently, especially when it comes to threading. To use BetterTogether in Unity, you need to use some kind of dispatcher like this one inside event handlers. Here is an example using the aforementioned dispatcher

using PimDeWitte.UnityMainThreadDispatcher;

// Usual setup ignored

client.Connected += (id, playerList) =>
{
    // This must be done with any kind of event handling. RPCs for example
    UnityMainThreadDispatcher.Instance().Enqueue(() =>
    {
        Debug.Log($"Connected as {id}");
        Debug.Log("Players:");
        foreach (var player in playerList)
        {
            Debug.Log(player);
        }
    });
};