For a few months now I’ve been fiddling about my own small multiplayer game using Unity. Basic versions of client and server are now in a state where you can play the first games, at least in my home network. But of course the goal is to play the game over the Internet, so I chose to host the server in the cloud of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). Setting up your own server there is a separate chapter, which I will hopefully be able to tell later. It turned out that Unity and AWS don’t work together for amateurs like me.
After some back and forth I had my Ubuntu instance in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2) at a point where I could start my server. But what I had imagined to work so easily finally flatlined thanks to Unity. In order to start a server without a window manager you can use the command line parameter “-batchmode”. When applied, your Unity-made game does not open a window when starting. Unfortunately, instead of starting the game server bid farewell with the following message found in its log file:
"-batchmode" command line argument is only available when publishing using Unity Pro.
This is definitely annoying since Unity does not tell you on its official page that this is a Pro feature. So, a lot of time spent to no avail. Even in the Unity forum there was just a single post to be found which mentions that this actually applies to Unity 4. To spare you the search: with Unity 5 you need a Pro license for batchmode as well. I’ve checked.
What to do? I don’t know yet, but if I find a solution I will post it here, of course.