Spawning Players on Scene Load

Tutorial for spawning players as soon as they are loaded by FishNet into a specific scene.

To spawn a player when they load into a scene, let's write a ScenePlayerSpawner.cs script that we can add to our desired scene to handle this.

1

Create the Script

Create a new script in your project and name it something like ScenePlayerSpawner.cs.

2

Make the Script a NetworkBehaviour

Instead of being a regular MonoBehaviour, we'll make our class inherit from NetworkBehaviour, this will enable us to use the NetworkBehaviour callbacks and properties.

using FishNet.Connection;
using FishNet.Managing;
using FishNet.Object;
using UnityEngine;

public class ScenePlayerSpawner : NetworkBehaviour

Remember that since this class is a NetworkBehaviour, it should not be placed on the NetworkManager GameObject or any of its children, but rather on a Networked GameObject in the desired scene.

3

Expose the Prefab in the Inspector

Add a NetworkObject variable for holding a reference to our player prefab.

[SerializeField] private NetworkObject playerPrefab;

4

Override the OnSpawnServer Method

Let's utilize the NetworkBehaviour's OnSpawnServer method to trigger the player spawning for us. This OnSpawnServer method gets called by FishNet on the server as soon as the object is being spawned for a client, thus we know he is in the scene and ready to receive a player object.

public override void OnSpawnServer(NetworkConnection connection)
{
    NetworkObject obj = Instantiate(playerPrefab);
    Spawn(obj, connection, gameObject.scene);
}

This code simply instantiates the given prefab and then tells FishNet to spawn that object on the network (the Spawn method here is directly available because we inherited from NetworkBehaviour).

5

Use FishNet's Object Pooling

We can optionally make the script work with FishNet's Object Pooling system by changing the Instantiate method call to one provided by FishNet. This code will work even if we don't use Object Pooling, so it's a direct improvement here.

The NetworkManager.GetPooledInstantiated method requires an additional argument to indicate if this is being called on the server or client. Since we are only going to call it on the server, we provide true to the final asServer parameter.

NetworkObject obj = NetworkManager.GetPooledInstantiated(playerPrefab, asServer: true);

6

Final Script

The script is now finished and you can add it to a game object in your desired scene and assign the player prefab to it.

ScenePlayerSpawner.cs

using FishNet.Connection;
using FishNet.Managing;
using FishNet.Object;
using UnityEngine;

public class ScenePlayerSpawner : NetworkBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private NetworkObject playerPrefab;

    // This method runs on the server when the client is about to spawn this object.
    // Since the player is about to spawn this object, we know he is in this scene.
    public override void OnSpawnServer(NetworkConnection connection)
    {
        NetworkObject obj = NetworkManager.GetPooledInstantiated(playerPrefab, asServer: true);
        Spawn(obj, connection, gameObject.scene);
    }
}