Overview

Photon is a Realtime Socket-Server and Development Framework that is fast, simple to use and flexible.

The server framework is written in C# on top of a native Windows application.
The Client API is available for multiple platforms, including DotNet, Unity3D, C/C++, ObjC.

The Photon High-Level Architecture looks like this:

Photon Architecture

Features

  • Native Core, highly optimized on Windows
  • Proven technology used in various commercial game titles
  • Responsive support by Exit Games
  • Server game logic development in C#
  • Extensive framework solves common tasks for you
  • Simple and flexible mapping of RPC calls to Operation instances
  • Message passing through fibers solves many threading problems
  • Lite is provided as simple room-based game logic for easy prototyping
  • Simple deployment, including machines in a cloud
  • Designed to saturate bandwidth before the CPU becomes the bottleneck
  • Slim binary protocol makes UDP ordered and reliable-on-demand
  • Common client platforms are supported directly, providing similar workflow
  • Photon wraps up the networking layer of each client platform
  • Communicate cross platform
  • Put your data in Hashtables and send it: Forget about de-/serialization
  • ... and a lot of stuff we don't blow up into a "feature"
The above documents the Photon v3 Network Engine. See navigation for other versions' documentation.