Network discovery allows clients to find active game servers in the same local area network without going through the hassle of figuring out the servers IP and passing it to other player.
Under the hood network discovery uses UDP broadcasts to send a broadcast to all devices on the LAN to which active servers will respond to.
Note: Network discovery only works on LAN and might not work in some networks.
The ExampleNetworkDiscovery class provides an example implementation for implementing network discovery.
To use the ExampleNetworkDiscovery:
- add the
ExampleNetworkDiscoveryand theExampleNetworkDiscoveryHudcomponents to the GameObject which contains the `NetworkManager. - Run your application start a server or host. A "Stop Server Discovery" button should appear on the left side of the screen. This indicates that the server is discoverable. The button can be pressed to disable or enable the discovery of the server.
- Run your application but don't start a client yet. On the left side of the screen a "Discover Servers" button should appear. Press that button and any servers which are discoverable will be listed. Press on one of those servers to join the server as a client.
Take a look at ExampleNetworkDiscovery for how to write your own NetworkDiscovery. DiscoveryBroadcastData and DiscoveryResponseData can be filled with more information if needed on a case per case basis. For instance the server could include a number of current players in the response.