[Need Help!] Is this possible?

Hey, all,
We are currently designing a game that is kind of Clash of clans like.
We are discussing if Photon Cloud is suitable in this kind of game.

For me, I am just wondering if there is a way to interact with all the players in the lobby(,who may be in or may not be in the same room).
The reason why I want this is because that whenever a client is connected to the lobby, I want this client to request all the user data in this lobby(or the other clients get photon cloud call back to know that they need to send their info to this client), so it will show if my buddy is online or not , and other functionality.
I know this is possibly in a "Room" Level, such as raise event, however, the game is designed to have more than 255 UCC (which I believe is the max player in a room.), so this will not work for us.
So, is this possible do things like raise events in a "Lobby" Level?
Kind regards,
Yifu

Comments

  • It could potentially be done with a lot of work, though not with events in the lobby. The master server is there only to list games and balance the game server usage, it does not offer any gameplay related capabilities (events and operations) beyond its specific operations that you can use to create and list games etc

    You would need to host your own Photon LoadBalancing instance but even then it would be a total brute force approach using Photon cause Photon is for the actual gameplay, not the pre-game communication and persistence style of things (you can not persistently store anything with Photon Cloud so that part of your friends system would never even work).

    But it will require a lot of effort and it will be a pain to maintain and out of my view its also totally unneeded. A game trying to do it out of my view would be totally missengineered as the software architect tried to use unsuitable technology for a purpose for which already top notch open source technology is available.

    Reason is that for the player - player communication, friends etc, the much better way to approach this is actually much easier and its what often is done: Build upon the XMPP protocol in your games architecture for the player - player communication and friend lists. It offers exactly what you need for this purpose and it scales extremely well at very low costs.
  • Photon focuses on room-based matchmaking and in-room communication and features. We explicitly decided against implementing a community. The reason is: There are excellent options for that already and we can't match those. Instead, Photon is easy to combine with any community you build or use, cause it's not implementing it all again.
    There is tech out there that focuses on the "social SDK" part: GREE (ex OpenFeint), RIM/Scoreloop, Apple GameCenter, RoarEngine.
    If these allow you to send a (short) message from friend to friend, you can easily implement invitations to join a specific room: Just combine inviting player name with a timestamp for the invitation and use it as room name.