Lecture Summary: Getting Started, Installing Packages

In this lecture, we got everything set up to begin building our multiplayer Tic Tac Toe game using Unity's Netcode for Entities and DOTS.

We started by creating a new Unity project using the Universal 3D template since DOTS doesn't yet support 2D natively. The project was named TicTacToeNetcodeEntities, and we cleaned up the default assets and renamed the main scene to GameScene.

Next, we installed the required packages, including Netcode for Entities (version 1.4.0) and its dependencies like Burst, Entities Graphics, and Unity Physics. We also adjusted the project settings by disabling domain and scene reloading for faster iteration.

To ensure the multiplayer setup was working, we verified the separation of the client and server worlds in the Entities Hierarchy. We wrote a GameBootstrap script to enable automatic connection on port 7979, which allowed us to test the host-client setup. We also enabled the "Run in Background" setting to ensure the connection wouldn’t time out when the application lost focus.

For testing, we explored two approaches: creating builds for client and server or using Unity’s Multiplayer Play Mode package for faster iteration. The package allowed us to test multiple instances directly in the editor, making development much more efficient.

Finally, we imported the visual assets and Visual Studio settings to match the course setup, ensuring everything was ready to start building the game in the upcoming lectures.