Cloud Gaming? Perform Unity Remote Rendering on ACK

By Qiuyang Liu (Liming)

Background

There has been a lot of discussion about cloud gaming. The core idea of cloud gaming is to connect the gaming client to the cloud, render images with cloud computing capabilities, and transmit them to the terminal. This can reduce terminal pressure and realize a cross-device platform and a lightweight gaming scene.

Major gaming engines have also launched projects related to graphics rendering in recent years, aiming to solve the problem of transmission of gaming images (such as Unreal Engine’s Pixel Streaming and Unity3D’s Render Streaming. The core of such projects is to realize the transmission of media streams through Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC). This article aims to implement cloud gaming scenarios (such as rendering images on the cloud and transmitting them to browsers in real-time) with the help of UnityRenderStreaming containerized Unity applications.

Before practicing, let's discuss why we need to containerize Unity applications. The usage time of graphics computing resources and the player's game time is synchronized in a gaming scenario. So, in an ideal situation, graphics computing should be provided when the player is playing and recycled when the player leaves the game. The lightweight container feature makes scheduling and deployment flexible, which can meet the preceding requirements and maximize resource utilization.

Next, let's perform a Demo of Unity remote rendering on ACK.

Practice Demonstration

1. Develop Unity Render Streaming Applications through Unity Editor

Unity Editor Version: 2021.3.2f1c1 / Mac M1 silicon

Create a new project and select Package Manager in the Window tab:

Click the + button in the upper right corner and select: Add package from git URL:

Enter com.unity.renderstreaming@3.1.0-exp.2, search for the package, and click Add:

A window will ask whether to use the new input scheme. Click Yes to restart the project:

After restarting, you can see the Unity Render Streaming package has been imported.

We directly use the official Samples. Click Import. The Assets table has been updated.

Since it is a demo, we will not modify anything but Build directly. Select the Target Platform as Linux. As for Scenes, we only select WebBrowserInput and click Build.

Name it mac-linux and get the following file:

In addition to compiling the Unity application, you need to create a webserver to realize the transmission access of browsers. This is an official sample, so we can directly download the corresponding webserver. As shown in the figure, click Download web app.

Now, an application that can realize Remote Render Streaming is developed. We got an executable file of Unity and a webserver. Please refer to this link for more RenderStreaming implementation methods.

2. Containerize Unity Applications

In this step, we need containerized Unity and its corresponding webserver. The containerization of the webserver is similar to most web-based applications. The Dockfile is listed below:

FROM ubuntu:20.04
WORKDIR /run
COPY webserver ./
CMD webserver -w

Please see Best Practices for Containerization of GUI Applications on ACK for more information about Unity containerization. Note the selection of basic images and the installation of the Unity Render Streaming-related dependency package. Select the version of the basic image from https://hub.docker.com/r/unityci/editor. I selected ubuntu-2021.3.2f1-mac-mono-1.0.1 for the current example. An additional installation dependency package is required for the example to work properly: vulkan-util, libc++1, libc++abi1.

After the two images are obtained, we deploy them to the ACK cluster. The practice environment is listed below:

ACK managed cluster. Version 1.22.3-aliyun.1.
The node pool operating system is Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903.
The instance specification is ecs.gn6v-c8g1.2xlarge.
The Docker Engine version is 19.3.15.

We put two containers in one pod and shared the network namespace. The Unity demo will make a websocket connection with the websever on 127.0.0.1:80 while the webserver exposes the corresponding port, waiting for browser access to establish the connection. The YAML of the pod is listed below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: unity-demo
  namespace: default
spec:
# Since the webserver example of the linux version only exposes the 127.0.0.1 address when we use the web socket, here the pod uses the host network and allows the browser to establish a ws connection by accessing the host through an EIP. 
  hostNetwork: true
  nodeName: xxx
  containers:
  - image: xxx:xx
    name: unity
    command: ["/run/mac-linux/mac-linux.x86_64"]
    securityContext:
      privileged: true
  - image: xxx:xx
    name: webserver
    ports:
      - containerPort: 80
        protocol: TCP
  restartPolicy: Always

3. Access the Service and View the Effect

Directly access the host EIP:80 in the browser. The following is the interface:

Select the mode of VideoPlayer Sample to see how it works.

The real-time display effect has a lot to do with the network environment from the results of multiple accesses. There is no lag when the network is smooth.

Community

Cloud Gaming? Perform Unity Remote Rendering on ACK

Background

Practice Demonstration

1. Develop Unity Render Streaming Applications through Unity Editor

2. Containerize Unity Applications

3. Access the Service and View the Effect

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