How to create multiplayer Oculus Rift games in Unity? Question Answered

This is long overdue. Many people have been asking how we network players in Convrge and I’ve been promising a tutorial for a while. We’ve gone through a few iterations of different techniques ourselves and I wanted to spill the beans in this post to help other aspiring virtual reality developers be able to network their own games. One of the driving forces of creating Convrge in the beginning was the mismatch between how cool multiplayer VR experiences are and how few were actually available. Hopefully this post will help even out that mismatch, and help you add multiplayer to your virtual realities.

The tools are surprisingly easy to use:

Unity Game Engine
Photon Cloud (by Exit Games)
Oculus Unity Integration
One thing to note here is that many, many multiplayer Oculus experiences already use these same tools. The “oh cool, what are you using for networking?” conversations usually end up pretty boring because the answer is almost universally “Photon.” Photon works very similarly to the standard built-in Unity networking tools which makes it very approachable, while also having a lot of advanced features and flexibility. Currently we use their PUN+ edition which allows up to 100 people on your app concurrently for a once off price of $99. Pretty groovy.

As I’m writing this I’ve realized how much easier this tutorial would be in video form, so I’m going to write out the general bullet points of the process and record the step-by-step in a video.

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