10 Connecting your game to the internet
This chapter covers
- Generating dynamic visuals for the sky
- Downloading data using web requests in coroutines
- Parsing common data formats like XML and JSON
- Displaying images downloaded from the internet
- Sending data to a web server
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to send and receive data over a network. The projects built in previous chapters represented a variety of game genres, but all have been isolated to the player’s machine. As you know, connecting to the internet and exchanging data is increasingly important for games in all genres. Many games exist almost entirely over the internet, with constant connection to a community of other players; games of this sort are referred to as MMOs (massively multiplayer online) and are most widely known through MMORPGs (MMO role-playing games). Even when a game doesn’t require such constant connectivity, modern video games usually incorporate features like reporting scores to a global list of high scores, or record analytics to help improve the game. Unity provides support for such networking, so we’ll be going over those features.
Unity supports multiple approaches to network communication, since different approaches are better suited to different needs. But, this chapter will mostly cover the most general sort of internet communication: issuing HTTP requests.