question

praveen avatar image
praveen asked

Single Playfab multiplayer server for multiple games?

Details: I am building a chess like game. I am planning to deploy a single game sever for all games. Flow will look something like this -

1. Players login using Playfab authentication.

2. Players request Playfab matchmaking service for match.

3. After getting a match, players connect to a Game Server using socket connection.

4. The Game Server just acts as mediator between players. Game server takes input from one player, does a sanity check of the input, and forwards it to opponent player. This goes on till the end of the game. Nothing more complicated than this.

Questions:

1. Since my game server is a lightweight mediator, I just want to use one server for all games. I do not want to spawn new server for each game. Does Playfab Multiplayer server allow this?

2. Since a single game server is serving all players, it may open thousands of socket connections at a time. Are there any hard limits to number of connections that can be opened?

3. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

multiplayer
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1 Answer

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Seth Du avatar image
Seth Du answered

A chess game practically may not need a hosted server, because an asynchrounos multiplayer game can be implemented via shared group -- Example: Turn-based multiplayer Async games. If you ensure that you are implementing a real-time multiplayer game, I will dig into the question for you.

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praveen avatar image praveen commented ·

Okay. Thank you for answering my question no 3.

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Seth Du avatar image Seth Du ♦ praveen commented ·

To be clear, PlayFab Multiplayer server 2.0 (MPS) is designed for session-based game, it should be suitable for your scenario, but as I have mentioned, it is not necessary. MPS is using Docker to create instances and doesn't mean you will need to pay each instance separately. The usage is metered via core computing hours, please refer to my answer in this thread - Matchmaking Flow with Multi-Session Custom Servers - Playfab Community. Basically, if the least expensive core can handle, you are able to host 60 instances per core.

For your another 2 questions:

>>Does Playfab Multiplayer server allow this?

Yes, it is allowed. However, PlayFab doesn't natively support connection management APIs or features.

>>Are there any hard limits to number of connections that can be opened?

I don't think there is. Developers in the community have mentioned that it is able to manage thousands connections via SignalR. You may find help from corresponding developer community.

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praveen avatar image praveen Seth Du ♦ commented ·

Okay, thank you answering my questions. I checked out your answer to Matchmaking Flow with Multi-Session Custom Servers - Playfab Community

Realized that I can achieve what I am looking for, but it will be a bit more complicated than regular approach.

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