PUN Classic (v1), PUN 2 and Bolt are in maintenance mode. PUN 2 will support Unity 2019 to 2022, but no new features will be added. Of course all your PUN & Bolt projects will continue to work and run with the known performance in the future. For any upcoming or new projects: please switch to Photon Fusion or Quantum.

Overview

Hosting with PlayFab (Servers 2.0)

In this tutorial is explained how to deploy a Headless Game Server using Photon Bolt SDK in the hosting servers provided by PlayFab. The service is called PlayFab Multiplayer Servers 2.0 (Thunderhead) and provides to the developer the option to operate a dynamically scaling pool of custom game servers in Azure.

There are three key concepts to PlayFab multiplayer servers:

  • Game server executable: This is the application that you are running in Azure. In our case, that will be our Game Server binary that will be executed by the PlayFab container.
  • Build: This is the game server executable, packaged with assets and certificates needed to run the game, in other words, a zip that will be uploaded to the PlayFab server in order to package our Game Server into a working image.
  • Game server: A container running your game server executable. There may be multiple servers running on a single virtual machine.

You can read more about how the service works and other details here.

This tutorial assumes that you already have knowledge about how Bolt works and have a working game with a Game Server and Game Client working. If this is not the case, please follow the Getting Started Tutorial (link) and the Advanced Tutorial (link).

Integrating between PlayFab and Photon Bolt require some steps, which includes setup and conding. In the next chapters we will explain:

  1. How to Setup your PlayFab Game Title
  2. How to Integrate the PlayFab SDK into a Bolt Project
  3. How the Bolt + PlayFab integration works
  4. How to deploy the Bolt Game Server and Play!
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