Advantages – Addressing the Requirements of Immersive Experiences with AWS

There are significant advantages to this approach, some of which are as follows:

Reduced client requirements: As the game runs on a server, there is less onus on the players to have powerful GPUs.

Simplified adoption: Players can start playing immediately without downloading large game files or installing updates. There is also less dependence on particular device compatibility or user-side setup parameters.

Centralized performance management: Server-side rendering provides consistent performance, independent of the client device’s capabilities.

Update management: Admins can update games on the server side, ensuring all players access the latest version without reliance on players downloading patches in a timely fashion.

Piracy control: Since the game isn’t downloaded, the risk of piracy is significantly reduced.

Disadvantages

Here are some potential disadvantages of this approach for online gaming:

Latency issues: The time delay between a player’s input and the game’s response can be noticeable, impacting the gaming experience, especially in fast-paced genres such as first-person shooters. This can be mitigated through the use of AWS Local Zones and AWS Wavelength to push the servers to do this rendering as close to the end users as possible.

Bandwidth consumption: Pixel streaming can use significant bandwidth – particularly in VR games where multiple virtual displays are effectively in use at once. Players with data caps might quickly exhaust their allowances.

Connection sensitivity: User experience is heavily dependent on the player’s internet speed and stability. Poor connections result in lower visual quality and increased latency. The primary technical parameter of concern to a player shifts from their GPU to their connectivity.

Keep in mind that access to games of this type is generally sold on VR marketplaces such as SteamVR, Pimax, or Viveport. Therefore, it is simple for the operators of these marketplaces to test a user’s configuration and connectivity and warn the player or outright refuse the transaction if their setup is not going to work.

Amazon GameLift plugin for Unity

The Amazon GameLift plugin for Unity makes it easier to integrate Amazon GameLift into a Unity-based game. It makes it simple to access Amazon GameLift APIs directly from within your application or use automation services such as AWS CloudFormation to deploy packages that include the EC2 instances needed to host your game servers, along with your binaries.

All multiplayer games need some mechanism for authenticating players, and this can be done using Amazon Cognito. This is a managed service that offloads the need for you to build authentication functionality into your game server binaries directly. The plugin makes this integration easy.

The plugin also gives your game access to digital assets stored in Amazon S3, to kick off AWS Lambda functions, or to output custom server messages for your game sessions to Amazon CloudWatch logs.

The following figure shows an example where a dedicated Linux server binary has been built that leverages multiple such integrations:

Figure 11.13 – Using the GameLift plugin for Unity to build a dedicated server for Linux