Needing more information about Photon chat feature specs

Hi there,

I was wondering if Photon chat could fit our project needs. I got some questions that I couldn't answer with the docs. Thank you in advance for your help and your time.

1- Is the chat feature available in Photon Cloud the exact same product than Photon Chat? If no, what are the differences?
2- Does the message buffer got limitations/quotas? If yes, are they applied equally to all chat "channels" and what are exactly those limits (how much max messages or max messages total size, etc ...)? Finally, what happens exactly when the limit is reached?
3- About message buffer again: are messages stored somewhere even if no one is in the chat "channel" ? For how long are they stored?
4- Could a message contain any serialized object and is there a message size limit?

Thank you again.

Comments

  • JohnTube
    JohnTube ✭✭✭✭✭
    Hi @relbekri,

    Thank you for choosing Photon!

    1. Photon Cloud provides different products like Photon Chat and Photon Realtime. Unlike other products, Photon Chat is only available through Photon Cloud and you cannot self host its servers yourself. Photon Chat has the same shared / common Photon Cloud features with all the other Photon Cloud products: Virtual Application (clients will connect to different applications if they use a different AppId or AppVersion), multiple Regions (also clients connected to different regions won't be able to see each other)
    2. What you call message buffer is what we call channel history. Each channel public or private can hold up to 100 messages in memory then when the channel is disposed of from servers you can persist those messages using Chat webhooks (public channels only). If you want more channel history size/capacity you can request it as an Enterprise customer or you can save the messages yourself INDIVIDUALLY using webhook PublishMessage.
    3. See 2. Messages are kept in memory as long as there is someone subscribed to the channel.
    4. Yes, messages are not limited to string type. They can be anything Photon can serialize: size and type.
  • Hi ! Thank you for your answer.

    1- when I wrote photon cloud I was meaning PUN. There is a chat feature in PUN and I was asking if it was exactly the same product than Photon Cloud.
    2 & 3- To summarize and see if I got it well: If all users leave a channel, all the channel message's history is lost forever except for a public channel which can rely on webhooks and a DB and a backend somewhere 4- cool.

    Thank you again John.
  • JohnTube
    JohnTube ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited February 2019
    1. PUN does not have a chat feature. PUN includes Photon Chat Client API or SDK if you want and a Chat demo that uses it. While you could use Photon Realtime's in-room messages to do text chat in-game, it's different from Photon Chat.
    2. & 3. yes
  • Okey got it ! Thanks a lot :)