Keeping an empty room alive?

Hi,
Our application uses PUN to organize online review sessions in VR.
Each review session contains a model to which the users can make changes. (moving it, disassembling, ect.)

Currently, once all participants of the session have left, the room will close and all changes will be lost.
We would like the room to stay alive or to keep its changes so if users join back for instance a few days later, they can continue their work.

Is this possible with PUN cloud hosting? Or would we need a self-hosted solution for this?

Regards,
Lucas

Best Answers

  • Tobias
    Tobias admin
    Answer ✓
    This happens by design. The point being: If you endlessly keep the room in memory, you have to run the server and that costs (dearly). Also it prevents us from distributing rooms across machines (which we may add to and remove some).

    So, with the Photon Cloud as a service, this can not be done.

    You can potentially store your progress, provided you have a webservice you'd attach to Photon via WebHooks.
    This allows to store and load the state of a room almost seamlessly.

    Of course it's also possible to write your own server software to do as you plan. Photon is excellent for that. You'd get the Photon Server SDK for it and go wild :smile:.
  • JohnTube
    JohnTube ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Hi @LucasSQ,

    Thank you for choosing Photon!

    For completeness and future reference:

    I wanted to add that you can keep a room alive for up to EmptyRoomTTL milliseconds.
    The maximum value being 300000 milliseconds (5 minutes) on the Photon Public Cloud.

Answers

  • Tobias
    Tobias admin
    Answer ✓
    This happens by design. The point being: If you endlessly keep the room in memory, you have to run the server and that costs (dearly). Also it prevents us from distributing rooms across machines (which we may add to and remove some).

    So, with the Photon Cloud as a service, this can not be done.

    You can potentially store your progress, provided you have a webservice you'd attach to Photon via WebHooks.
    This allows to store and load the state of a room almost seamlessly.

    Of course it's also possible to write your own server software to do as you plan. Photon is excellent for that. You'd get the Photon Server SDK for it and go wild :smile:.
  • Tobias wrote: »
    This happens by design. The point being: If you endlessly keep the room in memory, you have to run the server and that costs (dearly). Also it prevents us from distributing rooms across machines (which we may add to and remove some).

    So, with the Photon Cloud as a service, this can not be done.

    You can potentially store your progress, provided you have a webservice you'd attach to Photon via WebHooks.
    This allows to store and load the state of a room almost seamlessly.

    Of course it's also possible to write your own server software to do as you plan. Photon is excellent for that. You'd get the Photon Server SDK for it and go wild :smile:.

    Thank you for your response!
    This answered my question :smile:
  • JohnTube
    JohnTube ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Hi @LucasSQ,

    Thank you for choosing Photon!

    For completeness and future reference:

    I wanted to add that you can keep a room alive for up to EmptyRoomTTL milliseconds.
    The maximum value being 300000 milliseconds (5 minutes) on the Photon Public Cloud.