The concept of multiplayer was already formed in the 1970s. Throughout the years, the multiplayer concept has grown from locally played games on a single computer to games played through a local network to a globally reachable concept.

The purpose of this thesis was to study different tools for multiplayer games and evaluate possible differences in performance between them. This thesis project was commissioned by Ade Ltd. The first phase of the thesis focuses on multiplayer architecture and available multiplayer frameworks from which two were chosen for comparison, an open-source solution Mirror and software as a service solution Photon PUN2.

The evaluation of multiplayer solutions’ performance was carried out using the Unity game engine. The outcome of this thesis project was not a full VR training application, but the project was executed as a technology demo. The aim of this thesis was to research how user count increase affects the performance of an application and network traffic. The requirements for the multiplayer solution and metrics for performance and network traffic data collection were determined together with the commissioner.

The performance evaluation was executed in the FIT Turku Center's premises local network by collecting data from FPS stability, CPU and system memory usage, amount and size of sent packets through the network, and used bandwidth. The data analysis indicated Mirror to be more suitable for this type of VR application as with PUN2 there were noticeable delays in movement synchronization on lower user count than with Mirror.