Out of the Box Game Server for PlayFab.com

• StrangeIoC For Unity (included)
• PlayFab Game Server SDK (included)
• PlayFab Supports Building to Windows Platform only for Game Servers

• General Understanding of Unity
• Understanding of C#
• Understanding of StrangeIoC ( not required, but a bonus )
• Understanding of Dependancy Injection ( not required, but a bonus )

This repository contains the source code for a Customizable Game Server made with Unity3D. It runs in server mode (headless) and it's purpose is to provide server authoritive logic and / or Multiplayer networking functionality that can be uploaded to the PlayFab Game Servers tab. This is an Out of the Box solution, that is super easy to customize.

• Accepts and stores configuration params that are passed into the commandline of the server
• Sets up Unity Networking and waits for incoming connections
• Manages connections and disconnections
• Provides PlayFab Session authorization
• Logger
• Local Debug Mode

When getting started with this custom game server it is good to know or at least understand what StrangeIoC is all about. So I advise you to visit http://strangeioc.wordpress.com for more information about this framework. However, it is not required to know as I'll explain the basics that you need to know to modify the game server.

StrangeIoC has an MVC (ish) style to it. There are Views, and Controllers. Controllers are generally called Mediators. Since this is a game server there won't be any UI to it, thus the views do not do anything other than provide a binding to the Mediators. Mediators is where you will do most or all of your logic.

Once you've downloaded the project and opened up the code editor (whether it be Monodevelop or Visual Studio) you'll see some folders and I want to take a moment to review those with you.

• StrangeIoC - This folder contains the current version of StrangeIoC (which is open source and free)
• PlayFabSDK - This is a special version of our SDK that was generated specifically for use in this project.
• Contexts - StrangeIoC has this notion of Contexts which are like modules for your applications. I have created a few different contexts that provide additional functionalty for use with PlayFab and Unity Networking.
  • MainGameServerContext - This context is your main context and where you will place your views and mediators. It is the heart of the application and from the main context all other contexts are loaded in.
  • PlayFabContext - This is a specially generated StrangeIoC context to integrate the PlayFabSDK so that it can be more easily called using the StrangeIoC paradigm. Pretty much don't touch this unless you really know what your doing. Furthermore it's autogenerated, so anytime we update the SDK, this gets regenerated and your changes will likely get overwritten when you upgrade. So if you find the need to modify this, then please submit a pull request for us to evaluate your change.
  • PlayFabServer - This context has one functionality and one only, it parses the command line arugments sent in from the PlayFab Instance Generator and stores them for use in ServerSettingsData. Which you can Inject into your mediators and have instant access to it.
  • UnityNetworkingContext - This context sets up a Unity Networking Server and listens on the port that is passed into the PlayFab Server when the instance is generated. This all happens at startup of the server. It then stores the NetworkManager & the NetworkClient along with other important information about who is connected to the server. It stores all its data in UnityNetworkingData object that you also Inject into your mediators. We will get more into the details of this later.

Because the server needs to authenticate your users, it needs to know what Title to do this against. The server won't know this so you will need to set this manually. To do this, open up the StartUp scene in the StartUpScene folder. This is the main scene for the application and the only scene needed. There are some advanced features of unity networking, which we won't cover in this documentation that allows scene switching and sync that to all clients. But for now lets keep things simple.

Now that you have the scene open, Locate the MainGameServerContext and expand it down. Then Click on PlayFabServerContext. You'll notice in the inspector that there is a ServerSettingsData component. Put your TitleId in the Title Id meta field.

Now your ready to proceed! Don't forget to save your scene!

To create a new Mediator you will need to do a few steps.

• Create a file in MainGameServerContext\Mediators, edit the file and extend it from the Mediator class. Then override the OnRegister() method.

public class NewExampleMediator : Mediator {
    public override void OnRegister()
    {
      
    }
}

• You also want to create a View file in the Views folder. Not much goes into the view unless you want to put meta data that you would like to reference from inside the editor. (handy for debugging winks)

public class NewExampleView : View
{
    //you don't need this, i was just showing you that you can reference this.
    public float CheckAfterSeconds; 
}

• In your mediator you can reference the view by injecting it, like this.

public class NewExampleMediator : Mediator {
    [Inject] public NewExampleview View {get; set;}
    public override void OnRegister()
    {
       Debug.Log(View.CheckAfterSeconds);
    }
}

• Now you must register the mediator and view in the Main Context. To do this, open up MainGameServerContext located in the root of MainGameServerContext folder. To register a binding, find the section labeled. /* LOAD YOUR BINDINGS HERE */ What this does is binds the View to the Mediator.

mediationBinder.Bind<NewExampleView>().To<NewExampleMediator>();

• There is only one last step and then your ready to put your custom code in. You will need to create a GameObject in the Scene, (I know Right! Seems a little weird) However it's not, the scene is running because it is unity. But since the server is running in headless mode, you can't really see it unless!!! Your debugging your server locally (handy!) I'll get more into that later. Once you created a GameObject in the Scene, you want to add the View to the object. So if you know how to add components in Unity then this should be pretty easy for you. If not, select your gameobject click on the add component button and add NewExampleview to it. Now it's probably a good idea to rename the GameObject to NewExampleView or something like that.

That's it! you are ready to put your custom code in! If you run the project in the Editor, you should see the CheckAfterSeconds output to the console.

That is the basics of how the Mediators & Views work.

So now you know how to setup a view and a mediator, but now what? You definately want to do more than that. So let's say that you want to get some data from PlayFab and then send it to all connected users. Let's take Title Data for instance,

The PlayFab Server Context gives you some nifty helpers that you can inject into your mediators. In this case you'll need two of them.

    [Inject] public GetTitleDataSignal GetTitleDataSignal { get; set; }
    [Inject] public GetTitleDataResponseSignal GetTitleDataResponseSignal { get; set; }

The first one is what you use to call to playfab. If you have used playfab SDK's before it's very similar but slightly different.

In your OnRegister, let's make a call to playfab. You might be wondering, what about my DeveloperSecretKey? Don't worry that get's passed into the server when PlayFab Starts up the server. But when your in local debug mode it won't work. So you need to get your developer secret key from Game Manager and Enter it into the Title Secret Key meta data field on the PlayFabServerContext Gameobject in the scene. (Yep, that's it!) Local debug mode!

Okay so you've injected your two signals, The first signal is what you use to call into playfab, and it works like this.

  GetTitleDataSignal.Dispatch(new GetTitleDataRequest());

Similar to how you use it in the normal playfab SDK, except it's StrangeIoC style. You can also pass in your request params just like the regular SDK.

  GetTitleDataSignal.Dispatch(new GetTitleDataRequest()
  {
      Keys = new List<string> { "MyTitleKey1","MyTitleKey2"}
  });

Now this will call playfab, but it is not going to give you the results, for this you need to listen for the results by adding a listener.

  GetTitleDataResponseSignal.AddOnce((result) =>
  {
     //Do something with your keys!   
  });
  GetTitleDataSignal.Dispatch(new GetTitleDataRequest());

There are a couple of ways to add listeners, here i used the AddOnce, because I don't want to have to unsubscribe after every call. You could use .AddListener( delegate{} ) and then in your delegate method, you could do .RemoveListener( delegate {} ), but why bother?

Now you have some data, hrm.. what should we do with it? We can send the data to all connected clients. For now, I'm going to just assume there is one key, and we are going to send it in a StringMessage, I'll get into custom Messages later.

There is a lot of documentation on how the Unity Networking client works, so I'll let you read up there beacuse they tell that story the best. But I'll give you a bit of code that makes it super easy.

First thing is first, whenever want to send to a client from a mediator, you will need to inject the UnityNetworkingData object.

    [Inject] public UnityNetworkingData UnityNetworkingData { get; set; }

This object contains a property called Connections which contains a list of all connected clients to this game server instance. This is very handy for being able to quickly find players and send messages to them.

If we are going to send a message to all players, you can iterate over the connected clients and send a message to each of them like this.

   foreach (var uconn in UnityNetworkingData.Connections)
   {
      uconn.Connection.Send(1000, new StringMessage()
      {
        Value="Hello everyone!"
      });        
   }

The first param of .Send is the message identifier or message type of the message. You can use one of the built in messages using MsgType.[...] or you can make up a custom one. But it is important to know that if you specify 1000 like I did then the client must listen for message type 1000

Here are some resources on that topic: http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Networking.MsgType.html http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Networking.NetworkConnection.Send.html

however let's say you had the users Playfab Id because they were in your friends list, and you just wanted to send that single person a message. This is easily done like this.

 var FriendsPlayFabId = "12345";
 var MessageToSendToFriend = "Hey dude, come play a game with me!";
 var uconn = UnityNetworkingData.Connections.Find(c=>c.PlayFabId == FriendsPlayFabId);
 if(uconn != null){
   uconn.Connection.Send(1001, new StringMessage(){
     Value=MessageToSendToFriend
   });
 }

Well I think you now have the basics of how the custom game server works. This document gave you the barebone basics of working with the game server, Getting data from the PlayFab Server API and and how to overall get started with the Custom Game Server. Keep an eye out on the documentation site for new tutorials on advanced topics realated to the game server at https://api.playfab.com and if you have questions please feel free to post in our forums at https://api.playfab.com/community

Also be sure to check out the Client sample and the sample mediators that is included in the game server.