Getting Started Guide

The game

The FPS Sample is a multiplayer only game. There is no single player mode and you cannot play the game without being connected to a server. It is a pretty traditional shooter game with two different characters: The Terraformer and The Robot. Each have their own weapon with a primary and secondary fire mode. There are two game modes:

1. Team deathmatch

   Two teams fights for frags. Winner is team with most scores when time is up.

2. Assault mode

   One team is attacking, another is defending. Attackers win by capturing all 3 bases before time runs out. Defenders win by preventing that. Attackers can capture a base by having one or more players in the base. Defenders can take capture progress back by being in the base. Once a base is captured completely the battle proceeds to the next base.

There are two levels in the game. The primary level is built for Assault mode. It is called Level_01. The other level is mainly for testing purposes and is much smaller both in size and assets. It is called Level_00.

Playing the game

If you have a full build of the game, it will launch into the menu and you can either connect to a server or create a new game. If you create a new game, it will launch a server on your machine. If your firewall settings permit, other people on your LAN can now connect to your IP address and play.

Understanding the workflow: Standalone and AssetBundles

Working with a multiplayer game in Unity means you will be working a lot with the standalone player. To make a client and a server that talks over a network connection there has to be two processes. To make this workflow as frictionless as possible, we use assetbundles for all the content (levels and characters etc.). The only thing that goes into the standalone player is the code and a single, very small, bootstrapper scene. Only if you have made changes to a level or a prefab do you have to rebuild the assetbundles. (And you can rebuild selectively -- to some degree.)

The Project Tools window is used to make this workflow function in practice. The most commonly used functions here are:

Updating the registry only needs to be done when new game elements (ect. Character, Replicated entity, Hero definition) are added to the project

From the boot mode a standalone player can enter other modes. Some examples:

This will enter preview mode on level_01. This is equivalent to pressing play in the editor when level_01 is open.

preview level_01

The following will enter client mode and connect to an ip address

connect 127.0.0.1

And finally, we can start a server by typing

serve level_00

These are the main modes. In practice one will most often use the Quick Start section on the Project Tools window to launch different combinations of clients and servers. The way this works is that command line arguments are passed on to the standalone player. Any command line argument that is prefixed with + will become an command on the console. At the very bottom of the Project Tools window the actual command line arguments are shown. This is a good place to learn how the quick start tool functions.

The Console, Commands and Vars

To open the console at any time, press F1.

The console support commands and variables. As an example the command quit will quit the game. The console has tab completion. Here are some of the commonly used commands:

There are many more variables than commands. Here are a some of the most commonly used

Making builds

To make a full build of the game, there is some menu items under FPS Sample > BuildSystem. Use CreateBuildWindows64 to make a full windows build, for example.

These menu items are directly available as functions that can be called from the commandline of Unity if you want to integrate with a build machine.