Question Google vs Goole Play Games

Hello,

I've been following the instructions at https://docs.unity.com/authentication/ for setting up unity authentication.

I got the Anonymous authentication working pretty easily - however my end goal is to allow Google account login for cross platform cloud save and account support.

I am getting very confused reading through this... either there seems to be an error in the documentation, or I am misunderstanding how something is supposed to work here.

There are two google related sign in providers - Google and Google play games. They are listed separately in the documentation, they have their own methods in the authentication module, and they each have their own options in the actual Unity Gaming Services dashboard under Live Ops.

However, under the documentation for the Google platform-specific signin, it references Google play games heavily, as seen below.



I would want to use Google sign in because it would be cross platform - if you click on google play games, it clearly states that it only works for Android. This is obviously counter intuitive... am I missing something here?

I noticed in another thread that the other authentication types (minus facebook) are not truly cross platform either, as they cannot be associated with accounts using other providers. This undermines a lot of the supposed benefits/use cases of using Unity's authentication. I understand this is all still under construction and something may potentially be in the works, but wanted to voice the concern that most of these sign in options are fairly useless when it comes to cross platform support.

On another note, a nice example is given for getting the Google play games IdToken in the linked "Set up a Google Play Games sign-in" - however no example is given for getting the Google IdToken, and the page states it assumes you already have it. I've done some looking around and didn't see any easy code to reference for making this work, except an outdated example from google.

 

Is anyone able to speak to this? Is the documentation incorrect as I assumed it is, or am I completely off base here?

 

Thank you for the response, @chengg_unity ,

I still have some questions after reading through the updated documentation.

It mentions that signing in with a Google account (not google play) still requires the use of the google play games plugin - which subsequently looks like it requires you to set up an app within google play games. At that point I don't consider that a google login - it is a google play login. The spot that is confusing me the most is this: https://github.com/playgameservices/play-games-plugin-for-unity#configure-your-game

I was hoping to simply set up a google cloud project for my game, generate an OAuth 2.0 Client ID, and tie that into the unity authentication package. The authentication settings within project settings seemed to be what I was looking for:



But the documentation doesn't seem to be lining up with using this.

It sounds like an eventual OpenID Connect support would solve this problem, if I understand correctly.

Thanks again for the response - sorry if I'm being a dunce about this.

 

For anyone curious, I was able to get it working for a windows desktop build by following the example here: https://github.com/googlesamples/oauth-apps-for-windows/blob/master/OAuthDesktopApp/README.md

It pops open a browser when I click the button to sign in, and the resulting user ID token can be passed into the Link/SignInWithGoogle methods, which do work. Unfortunately I will have to come up with some way to shift focus back to the game after the ID token is received - but that seems doable.

However, I am a bit at a loss on how to actually integrate this into the game. Once a user does the initial link/sign in action, I would expect there to be a way to automatically sign them in again using the token saved in player prefs, or some similar mechanism. I haven't been able to find anything like that though.. This is evolving into a different question at this point so I will make a new thread.

Thanks for the help.

 

I for one am very disappointed in Unity Gaming Services for authentification.
I really looked forward to functionality, such as authentification, seeing that "Google" is there as a way to sign in my users (not Google Play Services) I was like - "awesome, finally, they did something outstanding".
But reading through the documentation, it is not clear, and reading this forum made it clear that it is misleading. There is no Google authentification - it is still google play gaming services but different sdks. It is still ambiguous how exactly to do this anyway. I'm new to unity and game development (6 months in full-time learning and building) and I can say that GPGS is a pain in the ass. In two games I've not done authentification because I had to deal with the S***ty GPGS SDK, which you don't really know why it runs or not. For authentification I bought 2 dedicated assets from the asset store and yet due to GPGS again I wasted my time and money. So when I saw Authentification with Google by UGS I was excited for a second, just to find the same GPGS SDK needing to be installed and handled.
Coming back to the new Unity Gaming Services, the documentation on Auth. is rubbish, like any unity feature the documentation for early releases is lacking and it seems that developers starting off (like myself), need to wait for YouTubers to "decipher and complete" the documentation and then we will have a video with a step by step how to exactly achieve x, y, z in the Unity Gaming Services - a long way from what maybe Unity wants it to be which mislead me to believing that it would be a fast and reliable way to get things up and running.

 

I didn't see this thread earlier, that's why created new one, but I'll also add it here:
I want to understand difference between Google sign in option with using Google Play Games plugin for Unity v10.14 and below which uses Play Games Services v1 SDK (description here) vs GooglePlayGames sign in option with using Google Play Games plugin for Unity v11.01 and above which recommends using Play Games Services v2 SDK (description here).

Because for me it seems like Unity just took two versions of the same library and named them differently. First it was just Google Play Games sign in (which actually they renamed to just Google) and the usage was the same as now in Google. I implemeted that old Google sign in with Authentication service - 1.0.0-pre.37 and it worked as Google Play Games and now they making it as Google sign in.

My main question is: what's changed or is it the same approach but using different versions of Google Play Games plugin for compatibility? Should I move to the newest one and the functioning would be the same?

P.S. My old version Google Play Games plugin started to failed on build because of:

Assets\AssetStore\GooglePlayGames\OurUtils\PlatformUtils.cs(34,39): error CS0246:

The type or namespace name 'AndroidJavaObject' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

or

Assets\AssetStore\GooglePlayGames\OurUtils\PlatformUtils.cs(33,30): error CS0246:

The type or namespace name 'AndroidJavaClass' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

 

Can someone update the doc page titles to be a bit more clear ?
Instead of
Google
Google Play Games

if should be called
Google Play Games v1
Google Play Games v2

Otherwise its really confusing