First, I wanted to say that the new code interface for corona cloud seems like a great improvement, and the new information available through guides is much appreciated.
I’d love to see more info and guides, including a complete tutorial from start to finish for a simple multiplayer game…
Random matches doesn’t meet my needs, as the game is 2-4 players with different maps, and resource settings, etc.
So I’m trying to figure out how to let players see each others matches, and join ones that meet their desired game preferences. The primary problem being that players can only ever list matches that they already belong to, and for that matter, can only display chats that they belong to.
That basically makes it impossible for potential players to interact with each other. There is the friends.find() api call but that requires a player to enter at least a partial username, and so that is extremely limiting to the actual pool of players you can connect to seeing as you would have to know them… to know their username.
So I’m trying to find a work around that I can use, otherwise, I am just going to have to give up on cloud completely.
Can I automatically do a friends.find( “” ) and get a list of every single cloud user?
Then I could sort through them and only grab the ones that have my games id in their user data.
If that could work, then the next problem is displaying only users that want to play a game, ie, who have started the game on their device and, who are not currently playing a game… Can I use the userdata Active = true/false in any way to aid this?
Another thought I had was, can I automatically add any player that starts the game to a “fake” match? Everyone gets assigned to the same match to start. That match, would never start, or do anything except act as a group to hold all players that currently have started the game, but have not committed to an actual match yet.
If I could do that, then I could display all players that are currently in that fake match and expose them to one another.
I could then have player “A” host a match (although the host actually creates the game settings and thus the game data file, I would not create a match yet, but instead create a chat, which allows me to specify a name for the chat instance, and that allows me to pass data to the client side via the actually chatname)
But because players can only see matches or chats that they already belong to, still no one would be able to see the chat that player “A” hosted, except player “A”. I could then allow player “A” to invite players from the list of players in the “fake” match, and once the correct number of players accept, the game would auto launch.
This method would not allow players to choose games for themselves, but would at least allow them to be listed in a pool of available players.
This is not a perfect system for my needs but would present a possible path forward.
I wish there was a way to display chats or matches that the player was not actually a part of.
So to sum this up
Can I do friends.find( “” ) and get a list of every single corona cloud user that I can filter with my game id?
Can I automatically assign any player that enters the “game lobby” to a “fake” match, allowing users in the lobby to see one another?
What does the user data [active] => false do? At what point is it set true?
Is there any way at all to display matches or chats that a user does not belong to?