Evaluating Photon Server for turn based games

ninadshah
edited July 2011 in Photon Server
Hi,

I am currently evaluating Photon server for the turn based game that I am currently developing. I had the following questions
1. A single game could actually go on for weeks / month, so when the user is ready to play the turn can they connect to the Photon server and play their turn? If yes, would the photon server hold all the game ids for active games ?
2. Looking at the iPhone Demo, looks like the GameId is what the client sends, when creating a new game is there a way to query the server to know if the game id is already in use? Otherwise it should not be that a new game is getting created and user joins an existing game
3. Is there a way for the photon server to send an push notification to the iPhone? Do you have any existing code snippet for the same? So once the user's turn comes they could be notified through push notification.
4. Do you have existing code snippets to understand how to save the game state data on the photon server, so that once a player can fetch the current game state from the server?
5. I had read somewhere about another offering from Exit Games called Neutron. Where Neutron supported persistent storage and supported development for turn based game. Where can I find details on the same?

Thanks for all your help

Regards,
Ninad

Comments

  • Thanks for your interest in Photon.
    Some answers:

    1. The Lite Lobby server application holds it's rooms and users only in-memory. The rooms are removed when the last player leaves it, so there is no persistency. But: This also gives you the right hooks where you can add persistency. Once you setup a DB, you can store the game state per turn or when the last player leaves. Store a list of game names (better: IDs) per player and you can access and load the data when the player opens a room (by ID). When the room is created, you can also hand out the state to the client by events.

    2. The Lite Lobby application has a logic to list rooms within arbitrary lobbies. You see that in the Chat Demo. Users can still create new rooms instead of joining existing ones. You can choose which abilities you give your users.

    3. Photon does not support push notifications for iOS. This could be solved by an external service which a server-to-server API but I don't know candidates for that.

    4. We don't provide persistency support for Photon. It's standard C# access of databases. This is something many frameworks could help you with in the DotNet world. Also, this topic is very game-specific.
    If you need help with your project, Exit Games offers professional services, too. We handle the server side for World Golf Tour and have years of experience with database handling, as well.

    5. Neutron is discontinued. It supported accounts and a lot more but was hard to customize server-side.
  • 3. I would likely start with Urban Airship with the research