Forum Multiplayer PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Discussion and help relating to the PlayerIO Multiplayer API.

PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Postby Astrovolts » December 19th, 2017, 2:19 pm

As the title says, this site is both a blessing and a curse. It simplifies so much, makes things clean and straight forward. I love it.

Problem? Player limit per room.

In real time multiplayer games like what I'm creating, I am trying to create a chat room that handles all chat throughout the game and sends messages to all players, so that they may communicate between game rooms. While I understand the reason behind the limitation, something as simple as a chat room wouldn't effect much would it?

Perhaps there is a way something can be implemented to handle chat & other things globally?

Cheers,
Astro
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Re: PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Postby robscherer123 » December 20th, 2017, 10:58 pm

If you have your own private server, you can increase the limit per room. I don't know if an increase would be good enough for what you need though, or if you need a near infinite number in a room.

I do agree that being able to instantly communicate between rooms would be SOO helpful in so many ways. What I've done as a work-around though, is to use the BigDB. My game has a system in which players can communicate with each other across rooms using my messaging system. Since it uses the BigDB, its a big "hack-ish" though. I create message in the BigDB, and say every 20 seconds I refresh the BigDB on the receivers end to see if there are any new messages. Of course this creates a delay in messages though, and it's definitely far from the most optimum solution, but it works good enough I suppose.
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Re: PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Postby vikreed » December 21st, 2017, 5:33 pm

I can suggest 2 more solutions

1) Use an external Server(maybe on AWS), which will be present as a client in each room you create. This external server can act as a bridge among various room. As far as i can guess, this External server doesn't need to be connected to GAME ROOMS(where user are actually playing).
I guess this can be very much useful for something as "Lobby Room". This will definitely require some work and just to add, we have not tried this yet, but PlayerIo guys can confirm if this is a good idea.

2) This is a solution which we have implemented and tried and tested. Works great for us. We have used an external server for Lobby System(Firebase by google). It provides a real-time database for up to 100,000 users. Eventually a socket connection for that many users, which can talk to each other simultaneously. We are using PlayerIO for GAME rooms only, and not for other purposes.
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Re: PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Postby realmaster42 » January 1st, 2018, 9:35 pm

Hey Astrovolts.

I've went through the same problem earlier, and I agree, being able to communicate between rooms, even if by using some sort of GlobalMessage system, would be really good.

However, I have made a workaround for this issue, which I think might help you:
I've made a BigDB Object for Global Messages, where the messages are added to an array, and then the game code reads those messages from the array. You can do this by using an integer to count the current message Index, and sum it up every time a new message is recieved. Don't forget to set the integer's value to the amount of messages in the array as soon as the game starts, otherwhise you might get repeated messages.

Cheers!
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Re: PlayerIO is a blessing and a curse

Postby vikreed » January 2nd, 2018, 6:52 am

Hey realmaster,

how many users have your game scaled to?

Regards,
Vikreed Team
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