Hi there,
I'm pretty sure I submitted a question a few days ago, but now that I look at my profile it isn't showing up, so will try again (but feel free to remove either one if it's a dupe).
I've been looking through the Playfab docs, and am impressed with how cohesive and complete it seems to be (especially the engine plugins). The crossplatform linking of accounts seems particularly interesting.
That being said, there were a few things I couldn't find much info about/fear aren't super possible, and was wondering if you had any advice or other customers doing similar things.
We're hoping to get a party system working similar to Overwatch, where you can invite friends to a party/group, and then you can matchmake together (usually the party leader matchmakes for all members then passes the necessary info to them once a match is found).
We also want to support multiple local players, so you could have say 2 people on one machine (it's a top-down shared screen game).
From what I can see there isn't a great way to specify that you want to matchmake for multiple players at once, or a way to reliably reserve slots in a server after a match is found.
Would we need to write our own matchmaker and hook into the Playfab APIs to get that sort of behaviour? Or do you have anything on the roadmap that'd help?
We've been trialling GameLift and their FlexMatch matchmaker, and were wondering if you guys supported any kind of integration there (I know you both do similar things, so I don't expect it's a priority. But just thinking maybe someone could use Playfab for friends, save data, achievements etc. and then GameLift for matchmaking and server hosting).
The way that players actually get into a party is a separate problem, but if you had any ideas on easy ways to implement that in Playfab then that'd also be helpful :) Not sure if we'd need to do something per platform (like using Steamworks lobbies on Steam, the equivalent on Xbox etc.), or if something like Playfab's Shared Group Data features could work (I've seen you guys discouraging frequent API calls to that though).
A few other misc questions too if you don't mind:
- is the indie pricing a flat rate including hosting of dedicated servers? or are they extra and billed based on hourly EC2 usage (up until you reach the max MAU)
- if a player has linked their eg. steam and xbox accounts to their anonymous playfab id, are they able to see their xbox friends list while playing on steam?
Sorry if that's a lot, and am happy to clarify anything I was unclear about!
Cheers,
Geordie