Photon Fusion 2 Host Mode vs Shared Mode for an 8-player co-op game worried about host-migration glitches
0 reputation · 08 Jun 2020, 01:30 UTC
0 reputation · 08 Jun 2020, 01:30 UTC
I'm designing a cooperative multiplayer game in Unity 2022.3 with Photon Fusion 2, targeting 4–8 concurrent players per session on Photon Cloud. The two documented options are Host Mode, where one client acts as the authoritative simulation and relays state through Photon Cloud, and Shared Mode, where a Photon-managed game server holds authority and all clients send inputs to it.
The trade-off I can't resolve from the documentation: Host Mode is cheaper and simpler, but when the host disconnects, migration is automatic and non-deterministic — the new host rebuilds simulation state from the last snapshot, and the simulation tick can jump forward or backward depending on interpolation settings. Fusion 2 apparently exposes no callback to customize state reconciliation during migration, and my game uses physics-driven interactions via NetworkRigidbody, which seems like the worst case for visible glitches. Shared Mode avoids migration entirely but costs more server CPU per CCU and adds a network hop.
The docs recommend Host Mode for "party games, low CCU, trusted friends" and Shared Mode for competitive or untrusted scenarios, but publish no quantitative crossover point.
Is the host-migration tick jump in Fusion 2 Host Mode actually noticeable in practice for an 8-player physics-heavy co-op session, and is there any supported way to mask it? At what CCU or session-length scale does Shared Mode's extra server cost typically outweigh the migration risk? Are there documented mitigation patterns short of switching modes?
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