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Thomas LAURENT avatar image
Thomas LAURENT asked

Entities in GameManager and Performances

Hi,

I would like to know what's the progress with Entity Objects / Files in the Game Manager, I saw it was done for players, groupes but not for title nor namespace.
In the documentation we can read Entity Objects and Files is the new way to go with data persistence and it replaces Title Data / Player Data and others Data things, but it's still not accessible in the Game Manager interface.

I feel like entities are not ready enough to be used for a new project as for the limitations we get : 3 objects of 500 bytes for free tier (5 objs of 1000B for paid tier) for all entities types.
Our problem is with Player Data : almost every CloudScript functions will change this entity and 3 objects is a bit short if we want to be safe about the future structure and size of this data which leads to use entity files for better scalability but it makes us edit a big file each change on the player we want to make.
Isn't it worse for the performance and ease of use (with entity files) than with the classic Player Data system?

Also is Player Inventory part of the classic api, the new entity one or it's independent?

Player Dataentitiesgame manager
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Seth Du avatar image
Seth Du answered

If you have specific feature requests on Entity Data model, please feel free to vote or create feature request in forum.

>> Isn't it worse for the performance and ease of use (with entity files) than with the classic Player Data system?

If you are talking about server side performance, there should be no big differences and I believe the most important things is make sure your requirement meets the design purpose of the feature. Player Data can handle most of these requirement and you can stringify the structured JSON data if necessary. Objects have light capability of version control and you can specify the “ExpectedProfileVersion” when call SetObejct API. I cannot guarantee it but the Entity Data (Objects/Files) will be more flexible and important with the updates of Entity Data Model, currently, it has storage limits and if you want to increase the resource limit, please feel free to contact the sales team on https://playfab.com/support/contact/. In addition, I won’t recommend you to use Files to manage any frequent changing data, though it is feasible.

>>Is Player Inventory part of the classic api, the new entity one or it's independent?

Classic APIs require Session Tickets in the HTTP header, meanwhile Entity API needs Entity Token. For now, inventory is a part of classic API.

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Thomas LAURENT avatar image Thomas LAURENT commented ·

>> the Entity Data (Objects/Files) will be more flexible and important with the updates of Entity Data Model

Is there any ETA / news feed about those updates ?

>> if you want to increase the resource limit, please feel free to contact the sales team

The actual limits of Entity Objects (not Files) are clearly more restrictive than Title/Player/Character Data which are older, better integrated in the Game Manager and supposedly more worked.
Entity Files don't have the restrictive size limit but from what you say is not recommended for frequent changing data.
I can't see a use case of this new Entity Data Model because of these too rapidly reached limits for games wanting to have a bit of margin for the future of its data structure.

>> For now, inventory is a part of classic API.

If I get it well if my game needs an inventory system and I want to use PlayFab existing Inventory (because it's convenient and avoid us to reinventing the wheel) plus I want to use Entity Data Model then I'll have mixed Data Models which won't work since they are separated in your database.

If today we start using PlayFab with the classic APIs what would be the pros and cons?

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Seth Du avatar image Seth Du ♦ Thomas LAURENT commented ·

>>Is there any ETA / news feed about those updates ?

Sorry, there is no ETA I can tell.

>>The second question:

You may correct because Entity Data model is still in development, but if there is data that needs multiple players writing, which will be a shared resource. "ExpectedProfileVersion" will be required so that some update API call won't be missed.

>>The third question:

I don't see there are any obvious cons for using inventory and I believe Inventory with Catalog feature can handle most of the requirements.

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Thomas LAURENT avatar image Thomas LAURENT Seth Du ♦ commented ·

Thanks for those in-depth answers, I see for the moment that the classic API will better fits our needs.

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