Configuring the lobby with the Admin Portal
Overview
The AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) Lobby service provides continuous connection between your game and players, by using The WebSocket Protocol.
WebSockets ensures reliable, real-time data transfer, by allowing two-way communication between the server and clients. Since the Lobby service is the main hub of your game, it is connected to many of our other services.
Goals
The goals of this guide are to provide:
- An overview of Lobby, and how to configure it in the Admin Portal.
- An understanding of the configuration of a Lobby, and how that is reflected in your game
Prerequisites
- You are familiar with the Authentication flow, that occurs before a player reaches the Lobby.
- You are familiar with Entitlements in AGS services.
- You have access to the Admin Portal, and can login.
Manage the Lobby Configuration
Lobby configuration refers to the process of setting up, and customizing, the backend services that manage player connections. This includes configuring various settings that are handled by the Lobby.
Lobby Concurrent User (CCU)
Lobby Concurrent User (CCU) shows the total number of active players. This value is refreshed once every minute.
Enable or Disable Lobby
You can temporarily disable the Lobby to perform maintenance on your game. When the Lobby is disabled, any active player connection will be severed, and no players will be able to connect to the Lobby. You can leverage this behavior to block players from playing, until the Lobby has been re-enabled.
Lobby Configuration
This section includes general Lobby settings.
- Keep Player's Activity: determines whether a player's arbitrary session data (which can be set via the game client SDK) is kept after the player disconnects from the Lobby. Toggle this option On to let player session data be stored, even when they are disconnected. Activity can be set as any string, for example: “Playing Survival”, “In Lobby”, “In Match”.
Entitlement Check
This section contains Entitlements settings.
Entitlement Check: determines whether the backend will check if a player has the necessary entitlements, before they are granted access to the Lobby. This can be used as an additional layer of security. The check prevents players from accessing games if they have obtained, but not purchased, access to a Client ID and Client Secret that might otherwise give them to access your game.
Select Item: is used to determine which item will be used in the Entitlement Check. The item will be taken from the list of items configured in your E-Commerce settings.
Lobby Service Rate Limit
These settings work together to determine how many requests a player can make to the Lobby service, before an error is returned.
- Duration Limit (ms): determines the time window (in milliseconds) in which a certain amount of requests made to the Lobby service may be blocked. This setting works with the Burst Limit setting.
- Burst Limit: determines the number of requests that can be made to the Lobby service, within a given time window. This setting works with the Duration Limit setting.
When combined, these two settings determine a rate of requests per unit of time. For example, if the Duration Limit is 1000 milliseconds and the Burst Limit is3, then 3 requests per 1000 milliseconds (or per second) is the maximum rate at which requests sent to the Lobby will be allowed. This means that requests made at a rate of more than 3 per second will be blocked.
Examples
In this section, you can find examples of how to use the Lobby service in some common scenarios.
Example 1: Game Client Keeps Player's Activity during Lobby Disconnection
In this example, you enable Keep Player's Activity. With this configuration enabled, whenever your player is disconnected, Lobby will keep the player's activity. For example, if the player's activity is set to “In Match” during disconnection, the player's activity would still be “In Match” in the Lobby.
Example 2: A Player needs the Entitlement in their Account in Order to Access the Lobby
In this example, you define the behavior on how the Lobby will restrict a player's access, except when they have the entitlement that is configured in Entitlement Check. By setting the configuration shown below, players without the AB Shooter entitlement wouldn't be able to access the Lobby.
