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Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image
Brent Batas (Lisk) asked

Entity Groups - How to notify members when the group changes?

According to the Groups API documentation, it says "Groups can also be used to make chatrooms, parties, or any other persistent collection of entities." (

https://api.playfab.com/documentation/Groups)

I'm looking into building a Party system using the Groups API.

Suppose Player A is in a party with Player B.

Player A then invites Player C to join the party (group).

--> How do Players A and B find out about the fact that Player C just joined?

The only way I can currently think is to call ListGroupMembers every few seconds, but that seems like a bad idea for obvious reasons. Or use a dedicated server, but the whole reason I'm using the Groups API is to avoid doing everything on my dedicated server.

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Andy avatar image
Andy answered

Right now, you would have to use infrequent polling. In the near future, once we've completed our pub/sub feature, you should be able to create a subscription to specific events and be notified in that scenario.

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Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image Brent Batas (Lisk) commented ·

Thanks for the quick answer. How infrequently is infrequent polling? Every 10 seconds?

It sounds like Groups can't really support meaningful parties then, until pub/sub is live. Even for Guilds, if updates come at 10 second delays, it will feel pretty awkward for people who expect real-time feedback.

I see in this PDF (

https://playfab.com/assets/etc/PlayFab%20technical%20whitepaper%202016.06.18.pdf) that pub/sub was meant to be "over the next year" since June 2016, but it's already over 2 years past that.

I know you can't give me an exact date, but can you at least give some transparency as to whether you guys have even started working on pub/sub or not? That would help me with my timelines.

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Andy avatar image Andy ♦♦ Brent Batas (Lisk) commented ·

I completely agree that, without Pub/Sub, any real-time use of groups is infeasible. Once every 10 seconds should be fine, but will need to be weighed against other API calls you might be making. You might want to figure out a way to bundle the check with any other data refreshes you need to do (via cloud script, potentially).

Out last quarterly roadmap blog post mentioned Pub/Sub brieflyhttps://blog.playfab.com/blog/upcoming-roadmap-2018-q4-oct-dec-edition. I can say that we have a team actively working on it today. We'll see if we hit our Q4 preview goal, but keep an eye out!

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Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image
Brent Batas (Lisk) answered

For anyone following this question, it looks like Pub/Sub is in private preview now.

https://blog.playfab.com/blog/upcoming-roadmap-2019-q2-april-june-edition

I haven't personally tested it yet, though I would like to in the next month or two.

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