Player Session Tracking - client_session_start & client_focus_change

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Walentin asked Jul 14, '23

Player Session Tracking - client_session_start & client_focus_change

After going over:

https://github.com/PlayFab/UnitySDK/blob/master/ExampleMacProject/Assets/PlayFabSDK/Entity/ScreenTimeTracker.cs

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/api-references/events/

I noticed that there is no client_session_end.

When a player connects to my game server, I want to manually trigger client_session_start via the server api and when they disconnect I want to trigger client_session_end. Is there a dedicated event for this or do I need to use client_focus_change (FocusState = false, FocusStateDuration = PlayerPlayDuration)?

If the latter is the case, will that show up correctly in the Trends Average duration dashboard?

analytics PlayStream

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Answer 1 · 2023-07-14T09:33:13Z

Neils Shi answered Jul 14, '23

In fact, the API call Unity SDK uses to track Session Duration/Focus change is WriteEvents instead of WritePlayerEvent. Therefore, in order to track the info you want, you can refer to the ScreenTimeTracker.cs and use WriteEvents to implement it. Since you want to implement this feature in server side, you may need to disable the focus time reporting (which in Game Manager - Title setting – Data Collection) so that the client cannot generate related events that conflict with the average duration.

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Walentin commented · Jul 17, 2023 at 12:06 PM

Thanks for the answer!

To clarify: WriteEvents is just a batch version of WritePlayerEvent? If I then want to use it on server-side, is a title secret key a valid X-EntityToken?

This would also address my concern of "dangling" player sessions - the ones that have a client_session_start but no client_focus_change. I was originally going to write one event when a player joins and then another once they leave. This can go wrong if the server crashes or there are network issues.

However, using WriteEvents I can just submit both events when a player leaves - manually calculating & submitting the session duration.

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Neils Shi Walentin commented · Jul 19, 2023 at 08:31 AM

The API WritePlayerEvent focuses on writing player-based event into PlayStream, and the API WriteEvents is used to write batches of entity-based events to PlayStream, you should refer to the ScreenTimeTracker.cs and use WriteEvents to implement your function. And if you want to use WriteEvents on server-side, you should use title level Entity Token, you can get it via calling API GetEntityToken.

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