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Welcome back, I haven't written a tutorial in a while so I thought I would make this one worth having waited for.

The purpose of this guide is to help you, the developer, to create a networked virtual environment without having to do any coding whatsoever. It goes without saying that the fastest methods of content creation are usually the best when working as an independent professional (or even as a member of a small team). With that having been said, I'm aware that this information is highly sought after and that I could probably benefit more by selling it as an eBook. As things are however, I will be providing this information free of charge () with the only cost being for the project file ($2), should any of you want it. Moving on, we need to discuss the following...

An authoritative server, understood in the context of gaming, is a process which simulates the virtual environment and updates all clients/users with objective data. As an example, if we imagine a group of physics objects colliding with one another, an authoritative server would simulate the collisions by itself and update the client(s) as changes occur whereas a non-authoritative server would simply ignore the complexities involved with the simulation and not bother updating the clients (which then leads to inconsistencies regarding what each user sees). An authoritative server is significantly more complex to create/set up than an otherwise non-authoritative version, it is also more demanding of system resources. This is an incredibly brief summary of a subject which is infinitely more complex than I have hinted at here but, for now, that's all you need to be aware of. We're going to look at a non-authoritative solution, just the very basics. Unity does have its own built-in solution for creating multi-user environments. It is, however, a bit more complex to set up than the method I am about to show you. Some alternatives to Unity's integrated solution are SmartFox, NetDog and Photon. Today, we'll be looking at SmartFox. A bit of background, to quote from the SmartFox website:

SmartFoxServer was originally designed to specifically target Flash Player based applications and games. Thanks to its popularity it has quickly gained interest among other technologies such as Java, Director, .Net/Unity 3D etc...

So, moving on to the first step on the next page...

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