Epic Online Services and multiplayer.

hi. i am making turn based game with multiplayer, plan to use Epic Online Services for friend lists\lobby\achievements etc. but not sure what is better to use for multiplayer game itself (sending game turns info between players).

epic services p2p interface looks a bit complicated and unreliable, so im thinking about something else. any ideas what should i use?
probably looking for some simple cloud service where i can just send couple vars between players each turn.

photon pun seems like overkill, since i dont need to send a lot of data or realtime movement sync.
for now best that i found is gamesparks.com. they have simple solution for turn based game.

i would be grateful if someone advised some other solutions or ideas. also Epic Online Services is pretty new, please share your experience, if any.

 

game sparks is sunsetting, mean they wont update it again. i found that smartfoxserver is a very easy option to implement a robust turn based game:

http://docs2x.smartfoxserver.com/ExamplesUnity/tris

 

hi, thanks for reply. looks interesting, but it does require installation and maintenance of a server =(.
i want players to host their own games, by using some cloud service as temporary data storage.
also for server logic, it needs to be writen in java?

 

you could use it as master server, that mean player would connect to it, have business logic go through it, and distribute instance server to player that register to that master server.

but if the only thing you want is to have short matches of turn based game, you can go with photon PUN it use the cloud.

 

If your matches are played in one session (without saving and loading), you can use Photon Cloud without hosting anything. It plays nice with external services and matchmaking, so it should be a nice combination with Steam's offering.

Even if your game is turn based, keep in mind that it might make sense to send some updates of what the current player is doing, without revealing what options the player has. In most TCGs you can now see how the active player browses through the hand. Even unfinished actions are shown (or hinted at) to make the wait times less boring.
You can do the same for turn based sports titles. In golf, show how the player positions and swings, before sending the actual shot as a "turn".

 

How about playfab will that be cheap in price?

 

Epic Online Services is complicated, has very bad documentation, and forces the players to log in to a service, such as Facebook, Steam, Epic, Google etc. to use it.

If it is a turn based game, have you considered doing the backend as a simple web app, e.g. in PHP? e.g. you could store the game states in a database and do simple GET and POST commands to the URL.

e.g. "https://urltogame.com?game_id=12345&move=west&kill=dragon"

and return the next game state as a json file. Only suitable for very slow games.

You could probably host it on Google Cloud for pretty much free although you may have to pay a little to use SQL database.

Just a thought!!!!!

 

Ya my first choice was firebase but their product is not gaming specific plus their login not work on desktops. I was also sure about gpg multiplayer stuff but that is depreciated. Anyway still thinking for best option.

 

Th

This is wrong we are using epic online services in our game and it does not require any login for the user to use the networking interface. It is also not very complicated, the only point I agree with is the bad documentation.

 

Firebase is indeed develoed with gaming in mind too by google and would be a decent choice. What problem did you have with the login? We had no problem with it in past projects.

 

Isn't it that it logs you in automatically if your game is launched from say the Steam or Epic launcher. But if you were selling your game off your website, for example, you would still have to log in to one of the services first?

 

Not exactly. While each player does have a game-specific profile and identity, it is not tied to any service unless you set it up for that, and can be created automatically when players first launch the game, without any interaction.

Of course, without any external login your players will lose access to their profiles if they uninstall your game or delete the access token. It also makes banning users less effective since they can create new accounts much faster.

So you can make your game work exactly like those mobile games which allow you to play online right away without having to manually login.

 

Interesting. Well, I've never been able to get it to work without some sort of login. But maybe I'll try again.

 

The documentation really doesn't help, and it can be confusing because there's also the feature of using Epic accounts, which is different because it's kinda the other way around: that's for when you do have your own backend database and want to use Epic accounts as an identity provider (similar to how you would add Facebook login to your game).

 

Check out how I did the login using a device ID in the epic transport for mirror here
https://github.com/FakeByte/EpicOnlineTransport

Even if you don't use mirror you can copy the EOSSDKComponent.cs into your project and it would do the login automatically for you.

 

A bit late but take a look at UniREST for your backend, could be useful. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/input-management/unirest-solution-182485

 

Hello,

Anybody knows if there is a tutorial video somewhere that tells how to use EOS with unity, and how it works from a programming point of view, how to use the APIs, example projects for unity etc?

Thanks

 

https://eospluginforunity.playeveryware.com/

https://dev.epicgames.com/docs?sessionInvalidated=true

Getting started and API, Samples

https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eossdkc-sharp-getting-started


I have used EOS since it started, its free and works just as good as Steam does, its even easier now a days to set up. In the early days it was harder for Unity users to set up, but they made a plug in for users. C# Source comes with it as well.
I use it with Unreal and with Unity game ..

There is a plug in built for Unity as well.. There is alot of stuff you will need to fill in from the account, it does alot for you.

what is nice you can use Steam, Discord, and have friends join games. This is built in.

 

They re-wrote the C# wrapper too. Now using structs everywhere instead of allocating stuff all the time.