Best plugin for online realtime multiplayer battles (with leaderboards)?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi,

I have been looking around for plugins that can help me build the online multiplayer functionality in my game.

In my game players can battle eachother and execute “moves” on eachother, in a turnbased way. (something like a Pokémon battle)

I made a proof of concept in Photon Cloud and it works great! It has most of the things I need:

-Matchmaking

-Creation of rooms/battles for 2 players

-Sending events to other players in the room/battle

The only thing I miss is leaderboards… for that I would also need some kind of authentication to identify a unique user. Photon does not include such functionality :frowning: It is available in PlayFab but it has no API for Corona SDK.

Can anyone advise me how to implement such features? maybe with an extra plugin next to Photon Cloud?

Or any other multiplayer plugin that can do the same as Photon but adds leaderboards?

#2

You can use Google Play Games for leaderboards and achievements. It also supports those multiplayer functions, and works across both Android and iOS: https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameNetwork-google/

There’s also the Apple Game Center plugin which does pretty much the same stuff as the Google plugin, but only works on iOS: https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameNetwork-apple/index.html

IIRC, Photon Cloud is intended more for real time multiplayer, e.g. a fighting game or RTS, not turned based games. Their selling points are things like low latency. 

#3

As Corona is going to aim for win32 and mac apps too, we were discouraging ourselves to use platform specific functionality.

Also we would like to use our custom authentication to register users.

Also realtime multiplayer IS what we want, as battles are fast and players have a time-limit to execute a skill in it’s turn.

We did some research and we think we are gonna go for Photon Server instead of Photon Cloud.

By hosting our own server with the Photon Server logic we can extend the code of photon to automatically save results of battles in its own database, also the user authentication will be done in this server.

If anyone still has better options I would be glad to hear them and take them in consideration :slight_smile:

Thanks for thinking along!

#4

You can use Google Play Games for leaderboards and achievements. It also supports those multiplayer functions, and works across both Android and iOS: https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameNetwork-google/

There’s also the Apple Game Center plugin which does pretty much the same stuff as the Google plugin, but only works on iOS: https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameNetwork-apple/index.html

IIRC, Photon Cloud is intended more for real time multiplayer, e.g. a fighting game or RTS, not turned based games. Their selling points are things like low latency. 

#5

As Corona is going to aim for win32 and mac apps too, we were discouraging ourselves to use platform specific functionality.

Also we would like to use our custom authentication to register users.

Also realtime multiplayer IS what we want, as battles are fast and players have a time-limit to execute a skill in it’s turn.

We did some research and we think we are gonna go for Photon Server instead of Photon Cloud.

By hosting our own server with the Photon Server logic we can extend the code of photon to automatically save results of battles in its own database, also the user authentication will be done in this server.

If anyone still has better options I would be glad to hear them and take them in consideration :slight_smile:

Thanks for thinking along!