Configure Lobby with the Admin Portal
Overview
AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) Lobby provides continuous connection between your game and its players by using The WebSocket Protocol. WebSockets ensure reliable, real-time data transfer by allowing two-way communication between the server and clients. Since AGS Lobby is the main hub of your game, it is connected to many of the other AGS features.
This article covers configuring Lobby in the AGS Admin Portal.
Goals
The goals of this article are to provide:
- An overview of Lobby and how to configure it in the AGS Admin Portal.
- An understanding of the configuration of a Lobby and how it is reflected in your game.
Prerequisites
To be able to complete the steps in this article, you will need the following:
- A familiarity with the Authentication flow that occurs before a player reaches AGS Lobby.
- A familiarity with how Entitlements work in AGS.
- Access to the AGS Admin Portal.
Manage the Lobby configuration
The 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 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 Lobby to perform maintenance on your game. When Lobby is disabled, any active player connection will be severed and no players will be able to connect to Lobby. You can leverage this behavior to block players from playing until Lobby has been reenabled.
Lobby Configuration
Keep Player's Activity: this determines whether a player's arbitrary session data (which can be set via the AGS Game SDK) is kept after the player disconnects from Lobby. Toggle this option On to let player session data be stored even when they are disconnected. Activity can be set as any string (e.g., "Playing Survival", "In Lobby", "In Match").
Entitlement Check
Entitlement Check: this determines whether the backend will check if a player has the necessary entitlements before they are granted access to Lobby. This can be used as an additional layer of security. The check prevents players from accessing games if they have obtained, but have not purchased, access to a Client ID and Client Secret that might otherwise give them to access your game.
Select Item: this 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 Commerce settings.
Lobby Service Rate Limit
Duration Limit (ms): this determines the time window (in milliseconds) in which a certain amount of requests made to Lobby may be blocked. This setting works with the Burst Limit setting.
Burst Limit: this determines the number of requests that can be made to Lobby within a given time window. This setting works with the Duration Limit setting.
When combined, Duration Limit and Burst Limit determine a rate of requests per unit of time. For example, if the Duration Limit is 1000 milliseconds and the Burst Limit is 3, then 3 requests per 1000 milliseconds (or per second) is the maximum rate at which requests sent to 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 Lobby in some common scenarios.
Example 1: The 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 Lobby.
Example 2: A player needs the entitlement in their account in order to access Lobby
In this example, you define the behavior on how 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 Lobby.
