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sickshark avatar image
sickshark asked

is Turn Base game possible with Playfab free?

Hello,
I have read a lot about the topic but many things have changed over time.
I have these options: Unity multiplayer (This will be dismissed soon do you confirm it?), Photon, Custom Server, Playfab.

What can be done with the free tier of playfab? We are a new indie studio so I can't afford much now and I would like to stay in the free tier.

The game works like this:
PvP, 3 minutes match, who scores the highest score in this time, wins.
No, positions of player, nor real time needed.

We will have "ghost" in the other player screen and simply the current score of both player1 and player2 on the screen of each player. The score get updated just sometimes before the end (as they increase the score), maybe something like 1 update every 15 seconds? The important thing is that at the end of the 3 minutes both the values are correct. No problem if there is a short delay during the match.

Could you tell me if is possible, how, and give me a tutorial?
Thank you very much.

Gabriel

sdksphotonShared Group DataMatchmaking
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sickshark avatar image sickshark commented ·

Don't know If this can be done with leaderboards? reading and writing a value in there?

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Andy avatar image
Andy answered

If all you're actually interested in is keeping scores in sync between two players at an infrequent basis (every 15 seconds is acceptable), that could potentially work via cloud script and player data. If you wanted to start updating more frequently, involve more players, or start sharing more data between the clients, you'd need to move into a paying tier and likely adopt some additional features.

Generally speaking, head to head PVP, even turn-based, is going to be difficult to do using PlayFab's free tier today. The difficulty lies in communicating moves from one player to the other. For that, you'll want to either stand up (very slim) multiplayer servers or wait till our relay feature is available. Servers will definitely cost something to run, while the relay service likely will at any real scale.

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sickshark avatar image sickshark commented ·

Thank you Andy for answering, however I still have some doubts:

-We can't afford other costs for now, also this games at this stage really doesn't pretend to have much data exchanged. As I said I will just show a fake ghost-player2 into the screen of player1 (such ghost is fixed, nothing is exchanged), I will just update the player2 score sometimes between the end of the match. Nothing else is exchanged.

What do you mean "involve more players" ? If I keep this exchange very low could I use it globally or not? also could you explain precisely how? with the leaderboard or with the shared group or how? Do you have a tutorial for it?

Otherwise I don't get what your service are for; In the sense that you state in the docs "make a perfect multiplayer for turn based card game" so is it really like the docs or is not intended for free tier?

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Andy avatar image Andy ♦♦ sickshark commented ·

If all you're doing is infrequently exchanging data about two players between their two clients, that can be done through Player Data and Cloud Script. While we don't have a tutorial that's going to show you exactly what you need to do in your specific scenario, here are two relevant links: Player Data, Cloud Script. These can help bring you up to speed with the relevant features. Also, while I'm thinking of it, you'll need some way of matching players together. For that, I recommend either Leaderboards or Friends.

By "involve more players" I was referring to any potential growth in the scope of your game mechanics. Exchanging data between two players isn't hard, but sharing a player's data with a large number of players is beyond what PlayFab supports for free today.

What article did you pull that quote from? I'm missing some context so it's hard for me to discuss what it might mean. It may be referring to asynchronous multiplayer, which is an easier problem to solve within the limits of the free tier.

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sickshark avatar image sickshark commented ·

Hey Andy I read this:
https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-players/shared-groups.
I kinda remember that @Brendan said that Player data shouldnt be used for exchanging score but just for data like name, email address and something that changes very rarely?

So I don't understand, as per my requirement, do you suggest me the shared group, the player data or the leaderboard?

a PvP project would be very useful since its popularity...

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brendan avatar image brendan sickshark commented ·

Nope, what I may have said was that Player data should not be used for:

1) High frequency updates (so, Andy's 15 seconds note above applies), or

2) Aggregating info from many players.

The only thing you really need to decide here is, with what frequency do you need to exchange data between the players? If it's more often than a few times a minute, you'll really need to use either a custom game server or a relay service like Photon Realtime.

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sickshark avatar image sickshark brendan commented ·

Thank you Brendan! But still don't get the difference between the player data you suggest me here and the docs I posted which suggest shared groups!
What gives me more power to my needs,What is the best choice, could you expand this a bit more?

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