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Christian Markowicz avatar image
Christian Markowicz asked

Custom Entity

Hi, very new to playfab. Trying to undertand how I best can transfer my backend to this framework.

From the documentation:
- "The Groups API is designed for any permanent or semi-permanent collections of Entities (players, or non-players)."
-"In short, entity groups can be any collection of entities (whether NPC or player-controlled, real or abstract), which need a persistent-state bound to that group."
-"Today, entity groups can contain players and/or characters.".

And finally a blog post from almost 2 years ago
-"Eventually, we’d also like to support the ability for you to build your own Custom Entity Types."

So, question is can we today create entities that are not of the built in type(always mentioning built in entity-types indirectly say there should be non-built in)? And if not, when is this feature coming?
My setup is to have Characters which have Crews(Groups) which have Spaceships(custom entities).

Thanks for any guidance or answer : )

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Seth Du avatar image
Seth Du answered

I believe you are talking about the UGC feature of PlayFab, unfortunately we are still working on this feature and there is no ETA for now.

In terms of customized items for characters. I believe the work around solution is to call UpdateUserInventoryItemCustomData to add additional attributes for character inventory items.

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Christian Markowicz avatar image Christian Markowicz commented ·

Not really sure I follow. Can't really find much on the UGC feature and how this would solve my problem. I'll attach my current setup I have in my local DB.

I'm not sure how Items will solve my problem? There is no singular character owning spaceships, but a collection of characters "crews" own a spaceship. The current idea is to model crews as entity group, which will contain object data of the ships and their additional data. But the ideal way would have a entity link to the spaceships which could contain the data themselves.

Thanks for any additinal info or clarification. As previously mentioned I'm very new into Playfab.

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Seth Du avatar image Seth Du ♦ Christian Markowicz commented ·

Sorry for the confusion.

>>"Eventually, we’d also like to support the ability for you to build your own Custom Entity Types."

The referred sentences is indicating the UGC feature of PlayFab, which is not released yet. When it is in General Availability, I believe players will be able to create custom entity types but there is not ETA.

Moreover, I'd like to know more details about your game so that I can possibly provide a work around solution.

My question is how do you define the character? Characters are objects within the player record which can have their own distinct statistics, inventory, and virtual currency. They have similar basic functionality of a player account. The design purpose of character feature means that if it is a basketball management game, and we are the manager, the character should stand for different managers/save data slot, instead of each basketball athletes in a team.

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Seth Du avatar image Seth Du ♦ Christian Markowicz commented ·

PlayFab doesn't support a customized (relational) database, hence I'd suggest you simply setting all the belongs parts as items in player's inventory and using your predefined DB to manage them locally in the client. Otherwise, if the belongs parts don't contain any additional data, you can store it as Custom Data (kvp) inside an item instance.

Please feel free to tell us if you have any questions.

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Christian Markowicz avatar image Christian Markowicz Seth Du ♦ commented ·

Thanks for the clarifications! Some of the explanation of the game exists in my previous question here: https://community.playfab.com/questions/36340/would-the-backend-data-for-my-game-be-doable-in-pl.html?childToView=36492#answer-36492

The game is a first person game where the player can create different characters (avatars) (unique abilities, appearance). They have to engage with other players to team up in groups (crews), which is where all progression in form of experience, in game currency will be held. The crews will also buy their spaceships to own, where they also will be able to buy/sell/change weapons/equipment off. They will operate inside these ships in an pvp game space, earn xp, and progress, buy upgrades/new ships, cosmetics etc.

Happy to hear if there is some other solution then to keep spaceships and its belongings as Objects (json or binary) of EntityGroup (crew) or managing in my own DB.

Thanks for answers in advance!

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