#Do I need a Lobby Manager to invite players to my game, or is there another way?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

worldly kindle
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Pretty straight forward, I do not have a dedicated lobby, players just join the game, do I still need a lobby to invite players or is there another way?

zenith fiber
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so for example if you have a lobby X

that lives on Steam backend not in your game

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but if you wanted to update an UI element every time someone joind X

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well LobbyManager can help with that

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it listens for cahnges on the lobby you have set to it

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you can also use it to search for lobbies and create lobbies

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but you DO NOT require it

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you can work with lobibes via the LobbyData struct

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or the Matchmaking API

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LobbyManager is handy for exposing events and fields pertaining to a specific lobby to the GameObject system and your Unity Editor inspector

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again usually used to hook a UI up to a lobby

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... also know that a user can be a member of up to 3 lobbies

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and that Steam Lobby

IS NOT

a network feature

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a Steam Lobby is basically a chat room

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its used to establish communication between 2 or more players

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it can also be used for matchmaking and similar as a result of taht

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e.g. you can create a lobby, set some "metadata" on it and then other players can search for a lobby that matches some arguments which will match again your metadata, and will also account for proximity, available slots, and age

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... anyway

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Steam Lobby ... IS NOT ... a networking feature

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you DO NOT require it AT ALL for anything networking based or anything else for that matter

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many devs would find it a very handy tool for common tasks when setting up a mutliplayer session

e.g.

  • Matchmaking
  • Discovery (how a user knows what to connect to)
  • Chat
  • per authentication/validation
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but you can also just connect to the server ID if you know it

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Lobby is just 1 of many ways to "know" what ID to connect to

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and there is no such thing as a dedicated lobby

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I expect you have a confused idea as to what a lobby is based on unfortunet naming that some HLAPI (networking tools) use

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a Lobby

as in the english word

means the place or space before

for example a "Hotel Lobby" is the area you are in before you go into the hotel proper

or a "Dentist Lobby" is the room you are in before you go into the dentist office room

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so a "Game Lobby" or a "Network Lobby" is the place you are in BEFORE you connect to a network

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it is not a server

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you dont connect to it

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Some people find this picture helpful

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that article goes through concepts, common use cases and has some examples for both Unity and Unreal

worldly kindle
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ah makes sense, thank you for your quick and long response!