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Andy Tsen avatar image
Andy Tsen asked

Should I really be relying on entities or Playfab Classic?

Several blog posts say we should be using entities but there doesn't seem to be many games in prod using it, and it also doesn't seem to be well supported in the Game Manager. The Roadmap here https://blog.playfab.com/blog/playfab-roadmap-update doesn't state any updates to entities and objects.

The tutorials and examples are also way more sparse than what is publicly available for Classic.

We are a well funded indie company that is planning on using PlayFab as the backbone of our MMORPG offline data serialization. I'm really concerned about relying on a feature that most people aren't talking about, has sparse documentation, and is poorly supported on GameManager. Entities seems awesome, but I'd love to hear from someone either from the community, or at PlayFab about how to proceed.

entities
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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Actually, if you check the details of the newer services (like Party, for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/multiplayer/networking/reference/classes/partymanager/methods/partymanager_createlocaluser), you'll see that they're all Entity-based. While we're not calling out Entity explicitly in the newer posts, you should expect that all our future feature work will leverage that tech, as it has significant advantages in both performance and flexibility.

As a result, what you'll see in the docs and samples going forward is specifically use of the Entity model, so you can expect there to be more and more in that space for that design pattern. If there are specific things you're looking for, feel free to call them out, so that we can make sure they're tracked.

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kennyroy avatar image
kennyroy answered

I I feel like I need to chime in here because there's a little bit of weirdness that is going on with the entity system for me.

For instance the entity groups take title_player_account as the member account. So you have to login and then do a GetAccount api call on the Playfabid to get your titleid. No where in the documentation does it mention that entity groups use the latter. Then if you want to have some custom organisation or behaviour with the entity groups you have to either make policy update API calls logged in as an admin or you have to manually type the policy into the game manager. Docs are bare at best on this.

So the old system has many advantages because you can do things like search for shared Groups by name, permissions are a snap, no policy nonsense and the docs are better because it's older.

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Citrus Yan avatar image Citrus Yan commented ·

Hi @kennyroy,

I will inform your concerns about documentations to the doc team, really sorry for causing you so much confusion.

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