Central component solution

Hello,

I would like to somewhere store data to be available across all instances of my game (eg. leaderboard, weekly competition between players). The amount of data is very small and its structure is not complicated (I don't need any relational dbms).

What would you recommend as a cheap and efficient solution to this problem?

Thank you in advance.

 

Does the data have to be stored server-side?
If not, have a look at ScriptableObjects.

Otherwise, if you're familiar with writing web services, you could write & host your own REST API and have your Unity app communicate with it via HTTP requests.
You could use either the built-in .NET HttpClient or Unity's UnityWebRequest objects, though UnityWebRequest is deprecated and planning to be replaced with something else in the future.

 

Thanks.

The data needs to be available by all game instances. So it needs to be stored on the server/cloud.

My question was not related to network algorithms. I rather asked about cheap solutions where I could store the data. AWS or Azure seem to be quite expensive for that.

 

Firebase has a pretty generous free-tier plan. Maybe worth checking out?

 

Thank you, looks promising!

 

I made a research on that matter.

Firebase offers two kind of solutions: Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database. The second one offers dedicated SDK for Unity. I followed its steps. However after integrating my application with SDK, big problems emerged. After launching my app (ctrl+p in Unity) I must wait 15-20seconds more. Afterwards I can observe additional lags during next ~15 seconds. I did it on fresh new project and it looked the same way.

So I changed my approach to use REST API instead of dedicated SDK. It works quickly and nicely. However I cannot find a good way to secure this approach. How to implement authentication? I do not have a separate server, all instances of my mobile app will connect directly to Firebase database.

Thank you in advance for help

 

After researching how to do this, it seems fairly complex to explain over text, so I made a little step-by-step graphic tutorial.
The authentication method I'm using is email/password, but the same concepts should apply with other authentication methods.
I'm also using Postman to send the HTTP requests, but the results should be the same no matter what HTTP client you use.

Spoiler: Tutorial

References:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/rest/structure-data?authuser=0
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/quickstart?authuser=0#user
https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/rest/database#section-api-usage
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/rest/auth#authenticate_with_an_id_token
https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/rest/auth

 

Thank you so much for such a detailed tutorial. I followed all steps and everything worked like a charm. I searched previously for a solution under https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth but it turns out that I should visit 'References' tab instead of Guide.

By the way, the bug with Firebase SDK for Unity I mentioned earlier is already raised but sadly still not resolved:
https://github.com/firebase/quickstart-unity/issues/639. Its quite fresh (2 weeks) though.

 

Glad I could help.