Storing players unique name used in every session?

FGStud

Hello,

I want to make it so that a player enters a name on 1st multiplayer session and when they do another session that same name of theirs is reserved for all time for that player every time they do a session.

Does photon provide a way to "database" like this?

Or is there a recommended way to pull this off?

The game is primarily mobile. I know you can do local device storage but I'm thinking a centralized storage area or something.

Thanks

dontonka

Hello,

As far as I know Photon doesn't provide this, except maybe if you choose their private hosting service, that I don't know. There are couples of solutions:
1) Your own solution (a hosted server + a database)
2) There is a piece of software which i don't remember the name (but it is somewhere in the forum) that basically provide such service and also integrate with Photon, but at the state I implemented this logic, it was in Beta I think, so did skip it.
3) I've also read in this forum a site that specially providing that service, but again I don't remember the name.

On my side I have implemented this my own a hosted server (so solution 1, hosted on GoDaddy), where I handle also my game's website, etc. This give me a lot of flexibility. I also manage friends in there, some analitics data, etc. For that you need to know at least a bit of server side technology (I use PHP) and MySQL. Basically, with that same server, I use the Photon Custom Authentication to uniquely authenticate the player, which all use a unique username, and you would need also an SSL certificate on that server, so all the transaction from client device to that server are encrypted, to minimize any cheating.

I hope this help

Cheers,
Don T.

FGStud

Thanks for the tips Don T.

With how you have it setup does the player need to create an account to play? I know that is a big turn off for other multiplayer stuff I had done.

I guess it's finally time to learn a little SQL and PHP

dontonka

With how you have it setup does the player need to create an account to play? I know that is a big turn off for other multiplayer stuff I had done.

Well, yes the user must create an account, unfortunately. I'm curious about your "big turn off", can you elaborate? My user only require to enter their username, password, and email once, and later the username and password are auto populated automatically.. so I don't think that's a blocker.. but I'm curious about what you have in mind and your experience.

The only way around would be to skip an account creation, would be to integrate with another platform (GameCenter, Facebook, Steam, etc) where the user has already an account for, but I don't want to go there that much... I tried GameCenter it was not working that good, and find it annoying actually, and since i wanna support Android and others platform, that would not work accross all platform.

I'm listening to your suggestions .

Don T.

FGStud

We gave the player the option to play anonymously or sign up for account via email. With signing up you got the option to retrieve & customize character and save, etc. 80% of players did the anonymous option.

I didn't handle the server storage stuff just tied into it.

Maybe if we had not offered the option to be anonymous we would have seen more sign ups. Maybe the game just sucked and wasn't worth the effort to sign up (very likely haha)

It was an old flash based game that isn't even around anymore. It was also 6 yrs ago. Maybe people have changed and it will be ok ...

dontonka

Yeah you got a point. I play an FPS currently on my iPad (a paint ball FPS which is ok), and since i can play anonymously i do that too, mainly because im too lazy todo the account creation lol, and the game was free. now if im paying for a game, that's definitely not a blocker, since i invest money in it , and if I bother to download a free game, there is something i want to try on the game, amd in that sense i don't think the user when seeing the account creation will be piss off and delete the game.. i assume this will be a very minor % of user which i don't care much about..

thanks for your thoughts.
Don T.