Deprecating AwesomeNET
Only a bit over one year after the release of AwesomeNET I’ve decided to deprecate it and close its page on the Unity Asset Store. To understand that decision please have a read and see why I’ve made AwesomeNET in the first place.
In early 2019 I was working on a TBS game that was lacking multiplayer networking. I’ve quickly noticed, that every Unity API that made such capabilities natively possible was deprecated and there were no real out of the box alternatives. A quick look in the Asset Store revealed, that tools like Proton were the way to go if you wanted to make a game with online multiplayer without writing the network code yourself. As the pay per concurrent game session system of Proton had no real appeal to me and all competing tools were following a similar model I’ve needed to come up with a solution myself.
Never having made any networked multiplayer game with unity this was quite a journey but after a few months the first prototype was working and it looked great. While working on my game I’ve added all kind of features to AwesomeNET so it would suit my needs. Finally, after the game went more and more to the background and AwesomeNET became my main project I’ve decided to post it to the Unity Asset Store as I’ve thought (and I still think this is the case to this day) if your type of game is a game that AwesomeNET supports (basically everything turn based, no real time), networked multiplayer is extremely easy to set up with second to none networking knowledge and gave you as a developer the freedom to chose whether you wanted to host the servers yourself or give the player a server application they can run themselves.
However, time has passed, and there are new, even better tools that not only work for a small niche of games like AwesomeNET does but nearly for every game you can imagine. I’m talking about tools like Mirror which is basically a newer, better version of the Unity High Level Networking Stack. It’s free and open source! Tools like this are the future of Unity networking and I see no reason to sell a product that costs more, can do less and is way less robust than libraries like Mirror.
After all, I’ve learned a lot while developing, maintaining and supporting AwesomeNET and I still would love to see the ease of use AwesomeNET offered you in any other networking multiplayer tool but I guess the more features a library offers the more complicated and unintuitive it’ll get.
In the end I want to thank everyone that bought AwesomeNET, shared their views and helped to maintain the project! There were a few nice games made with AwesomeNET and I’m proud that I could contribute to them. AwesomeNET will be free to download but will no longer be updated from this point in time.
Thank you for using AwesomeNET <3