Streaming textures possible?

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Could anyone possibly show me how to transfer the byte[] of a texture from one client to another (using Unity's built in networking if possible). Essentially I would like to stream the texture from an object on client1 to an object on client 2. I would like to do this for as many frames possible (so compression/decompression would be nice). This is for experimental purposes so I'm not as concerned with bandwidth usage as I am with proof of concept. Any help achieving this affect would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

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Answer by Dreamora · Jul 12, 2011 at 11:07 PM

With unity networking, nope, not reasonably as you have to convert all to strings and even there you have size limits. But with regular sockets, there is no reason why it shouldn't work

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Bunny83 · Jul 13, 2011 at 03:06 AM 1

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You could even use OnSerializeNetworkView with reliable delta compression and setup your own transfer protocol. There you can stream all kind of data, you just have to make sure that the receiving peer reads the same amount that have been sent.

I use this method for our Hack&Slash game to transfer server snapshots of different sizes but i use unreliable of course ;) You have to serialize always some kind of header so the receiving peer knows what data follows.

So it is possible but i guess it's less limited with sockets. Well, sockets have of course the limitation that you can't open a listening socket in a webplayer while with unity network you can start a server.

kaleetos · Jul 13, 2011 at 01:04 PM 0

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@Warwick- I don't see how I could send the entire Color[] on a per frame basis (the bitstream does not support Color[] serialization). I could probably split up the Color[] into ints and then (on the other end) reconstruct the Color[] and subsequently read the pixels. However this would mean the texture on client B would would be multiple frames behind the texture on client A. I need a way to send the entire texture once per frame.

@Dreamora- This is what I feared haha. I might I have to brush up on my .NET and get hacking away at the network code.

@Bunny- This seems like an interesting idea. Exactly how would I go about setting up a custom transfer protocol that Unity's networking will accept. Is it possible perhaps to combine Warwick's suggestion and yours(send the Color[] from Texture2D.GetPixels through the OnSerializeNetworkView once per frame). If this is possible, this would be ideal. If I may add-- these are not, by any means, large textures so sending the entire texture once per frame should not be a problem as far as bandwidth goes.

Answer 2

Answer by Waz · Jul 12, 2011 at 11:05 PM

You can use Texture2D's GetPixels, then transfer them the same as any other data.

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Bunny83 · Jul 13, 2011 at 03:08 AM 0

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If you use Texture2D.EncodeToPNG and Texture2D.LoadImage it's at least compressed ;)

Answer 3

Answer by kaleetos · Jul 17, 2011 at 02:07 PM

To those of you who want to know, Dreamora's suggestion was the route I ended up taking. I turned the textures2d.getpixels into bytes[] and sent them over standard udp sockets. Reconstructed the texture on the other side and voila, streaming textures.

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Julien-Lynge · Oct 26, 2011 at 09:15 PM 0

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Just curious: what was the application for this? I'm trying to figure out why you'd want to stream a texture that's constantly changing.

Streaming textures possible?

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