I’ve been researching about PlayFab, GameSparks and Photon and I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to use any of those services to create a Master Server to connect people.
I just want something simple, I want people to host their games and send the details to the Master Server so clients would be able to search for open sessions.
I don’t want a different Online Subsystem and I’d like to be able to make Android, HTML5 and Non-Steam desktop gamers play with each other.
Does anyone have experience with any of the services I mentioned?
Playfab and GameSparks will allow you to configure some crossplatform logic to match and connect your players to a UE4 game instance. However you’ll have to figure out a solution to host that server which both Playfab and GameSparks don’t do. Photon, Multiplay etc might be solutions to that problem.
You could either switch your online subsystem completely to Photon so you don’t have to deal with 2 systems or you could also only use it to exchange information about which open games are available, while using UE4s builtin networking system for ingame communication.
Actually, PlayFab does provide hosting for custom game servers One other alternative is that we support external game server hosting, so that you can connect arbitrary hosts to our service so that matchmaking can find them (With our hosting, the matchmaker is aware of all the servers running, so there’s nothing extra to do in that case, and with external server hosting, your server registers itself with us and calls a heartbeat once a minute to let us know it’s still there and available for matchmaking. In either case, a client would make a call to Matchmake, which returns the first available slot that meets the requirements (you can specify things like region, game mode, and a statistic for skill-based search, as well as any unique tagging system you want to apply as filtering). So you’ve got plenty of options to choose from, depending on what your specific needs are.
