Asynchronous Gameplay with Flox?

mattbrand

Hi! My game Pathogen is built in Starling using FlashBuilder 4.6. It is a turn-based strategy game. The basic game is complete, and now I need to build the turn-based asynchronous multiplayer functionality.

I started looking into Flox to see if it will support asynchronous turn-based gameplay. I see that you can save and load entities by id for a single player. Can entities be shared between players, in order to pass turn information between 2 players for a game? If not, is there another data type in Flox that would support this type of interaction?

Holger

Hello Matt, thanks for checking out flox!

Yes, it is possible to share entities between players! Async multiplayer was one of the usecases we built the permission system for. You can create entities that are shared between several players. Check out the documentation at the bottom of this page: https://www.flox.cc/docs/entity-introduction.

We're also working on way to get real-time updates on entity changes. But you'll have to wait a little more for this one.

hth

mattbrand

Great, thanks so much for the quick answer. I've been working with Players and Entities to make a very simple turn-based game structure. Once I get it working, I will incorporate it into my full game Pathogen. Thanks again!!!

randalfien

Hi, I'm also looking for a way to implement asynchronous multiplayer.

...between several players

How do you do this? The only thing I found in the docs is that you can change the ownership from one player to another. That way only one of those players sees the entity.

I guess I can save the entity locally, then change the ownership and if I don't find it next time, I assume the other player has not played his turn yet. Is that the recommended approach here?

Holger

Hello randalfien, exactly: if you have to ping-pong an entity between two players you can do it in two ways:

Option 1 would be to use the ownerID as you suggested:

1) Create the entity and add the data you need to transfer locally.
2) Set the entities owner to the other parties player ID (e.g. P2) and store the entity. Now only the other guy can query/load the entity.
3) He then can update the data, change the owner back to P1 and save it again.

Option 2 would be to track who's next on a public entity.

1) Create an entity and share it's ID between P1 and P2. Add a property like "nextUp" and set it to "P2".
2) Now both players can load and access the entity, but have to keep to the "nextUp" property to decide if they are allowed to make changes.

Does this help?

Daniel

You can make an Entity visible by all users if you set its "publicAccess" property like this:

entity.publicAccess = Access.READ;

(Per default, it's "Access.NONE".) That way, anybody who knows the id of the entity or can query it, can read it. If you want to allow anybody to modify it, you can use "Access.READ_WRITE" instead.

Is that what you were looking for?

randalfien

Thanks so much! I think I'll go with option 1 as Holger suggested.
If I understand queries and operations correctly this option will be "cheaper", because it will not require any indexed properties - query will be simply:

var query:Query = new Query(Challange);

Which will get me all games the user should play (it's his turn) and should cost just one operation (or is it one per result?).

When I update the entity, the save should cost just two ops, right?

For option 2 I would need a mechanism for exchanging the challange id, probably indexed properties player1Id and player2Id for which to query like:

var query:Query = new Query(Challange, "player1Id == ? OR player2ID == ?", "id","id");

This should also cost 1 op, but it would be "costly" to save (2+2*2 ops), right?

Or maybe just use the nextUp property like:

var query:Query = new Query(Challange, "nextUp == ?", "myId");

Which will still be a little costlier than option 1.

The only disadvantage to option 1 I see, is that I'll need to store the challange ID's of the challange entities locally (no big deal with sqlite )

Thanks again for support.

mikron

Hi, just to make it clear for me. We still need to poll the 'turn' field by the player who waits for his turn in order to know his side can make move, right?

There is still no 'push' mechanism that will notify of an entity change automatically?

Holger

Hello mikron,

you're right. One side needs to poll. If your game is mobile you could use something like Urban Airship to send push notifications instead of polling.

Al_Birdie

*cough* hidden feature request... *cough* Push directly from Flox. 😜

Need to see a doctor to get rid of that nasty cough.

mikron

*sneezes*... god that thing is contagious! it's going uncontrollably viral!

Frankly, in my opinion it should be your first priority since developers like myself will look for and implement alternative platforms, and once I do it and it works fine, I won't implement a different solution.

Thanks! 🙂

randalfien

Does anyone know if Pushwoosh can be used to push notification like this? There is nothing in the docs or FAQs to indicate if I can call their service to notify one specific player that it is their turn. If any has experience with this or other service please comment 😉
Thanks!

Al_Birdie

I can't say anything about Pushwoosh (we actually run our own backend that sends out the push notifications to Apple and Google), but from a technical point of view there isn't anything that would prevent you from doing so as long as you've got the other players unique identifier. That is in case the player identifiers are actually mapped to the actual device ids in the providers database, which is pretty much a given I suppose.