Where do I learn how to put "Social Networking" into my Unity game?

I have been reading about the different questions on here that ask about Social Networking in a Unity app. I’m looking to do that for the game that I’m working on right now but I am not going to go crazy with it. All I want to be able to do is have people “text” each other in my app while they are playing the game. Can anyone direct me as to where I might be able to learn how to add that feature into my app? I don’t mind books at all or research on the web. I just don’t know where to go to learn that aspect of Unity.

Thanks so much!!!

Tom

Here are three possible solutions:

  1. Use Unity’s networking. The pros of this are that it’s very simple and quick to learn and also you can use them for free. From experience these work well and are very efficient and reliable for small multiplayer/chatting applications.

The link alucardj referred is one good way to learn Unity networking which uses a networking library called Raknet I believe. Also the M2H Ultimate Networking tutorials are amazing for learning this.

  1. Use a 3rd party server designed for use with Unity such as Photon or SmartFox. These are both excellent solutions and very affordable, however you will need Unity pro if you plan on using these for mobile. Well worth the investment in my opinion. These programs could potentially reduce development time by hundreds of hours. I haven’t used SmartFox, but I hear good things, and I know Photon is a sturdy server. Again, M2H has tutorials for Photon, although it will be significantly more work to basically program your own back-end using Photon’s client interface.

  2. Make your own! There’s nothing stopping you from doing everything entirely yourself. I’ll be honest, it will be a lot of work but the product will be your own and free forever. I have a blog related to this, as well as some short video tutorials on how to set up your own custom server: videos / blog

With any of these three paths, learning network programming will require many hours of work. I also suggest typing things out and really try to absorb whatever tutorial you are studying, that way it will be a breeze later on to expand it or add custom features.