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Multiplayer Manager overview

  • Article

This topic describes the high-level API for adding multiplayer functionality by managing sessions, matchmaking, and game invites. The API provides a state-based and an event-based programming model.

Xbox services provides extensive support for adding multiplayer functionality to your titles so that your game can connect Xbox members across the world. This includes rich matchmaking scenarios, the ability for a player to join a friend's game in progress, and more.

Implementing Xbox services multiplayer by using the Multiplayer APIs directly can be a complex task. It requires a large degree of design and testing to verify that you're following best practices and meeting certification requirements.

Multiplayer Manager makes it easy to add multiplayer functionality to your game by managing sessions and matchmaking, and by providing a state-based and an event-based programming model.

Multiplayer Manager is a set of APIs. They're designed to make it easy to implement multiplayer scenarios for Xbox services games with peer-hosted multiplayer designs.

Multiplayer Manager provides an API that's centered around common multiplayer scenarios such as playing multiplayer games with friends, handling game invites, handling join-in-progress, matchmaking, and more.

Multiplayer Manager supports multiple local users. It also makes it easier for your title to integrate with Multiplayer Session Directory (MPSD) if you're using a third-party matchmaking service. Many of these scenarios can be accomplished with just a few API calls.

Key features

The main features of the Multiplayer Manager API are as follows.

  • Easy session management and Xbox services matchmaking
  • State-based and event-based programming model
  • Ensures Xbox services best practices along with being Multiplayer XR-compliant
  • Implements 2015 Multiplayer flowcharts

Important information about Multiplayer Manager API design is as follows.

Important

To pass certification, your game must still implement the required events for online multiplayer.

Overview

Multiplayer Manager is centered around the following key concepts.

  • Lobby session: A persistent session that's used for managing users who are local to the device and the invited friends who want to play together.

    The group can play the game; for example, multiple rounds, maps, and levels. The lobby session tracks this core group of friends (including players local to the device). Typically, this group is formed while the host might be navigating through the menus and chatting with the group members to decide what game mode they want to play.

  • Game session: Tracks players who are playing a specific instance of the game.

    For example, a race, map, or level. You can create a new game session via XblMultiplayerManagerJoinGameFromLobby that includes the members in the lobby session.

    When a member accepts an invite, they will be added to the lobby and the game session (if there's room).

    Additional players can be added to the game session if matchmaking is enabled, but those additional players aren't added to the lobby session. This means that when the game ends, the players in the lobby session are still together, while the extra players from matchmaking aren't.

  • XblMultiplayerManagerMember: Represents an individual user signed in on a local or remote device.

  • XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork: Ensures proper game state updates are maintained between the title and the Xbox services Multiplayer service.

    To ensure best performance, XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork must be called frequently, such as once per frame.

    XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork provides you with an array of XblMultiplayerEvent callback events for the game to handle.

State machine

The XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork call is necessary to ensure that your state is kept fresh. For Multiplayer Manager to do its work, you must call the XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork method regularly. The most reliable way to do this is to call it at least once per frame.

XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork returns quickly when it has no work to do, so there's no reason for concern about calling it too often.

Threading

All objects returned by the Multiplayer Manager API shouldn't be considered thread-safe. However, it gives you control to do thread synchronization if you are calling it from multiple threads.

The library has internal multithreading protection. However, you still need to implement your own locking if you require one thread to access any values; for example, walking the members list while another thread might be invoking XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork.

State-based model updating

Multiplayer Manager maintains a state-based model that updates the sessions in the background as players join, leave, or when sessions are updated. To help avoid thread synchronization problems between the UI thread and your game thread, Multiplayer Manager doesn't update the app-visible state of the sessions until you call the XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork method.

Traditionally, you would receive notifications about events, such as session changes on a background thread, and then have to synchronize it with a UI thread to display these changes. With Multiplayer Manager, this behind-the-scenes work is done for you.

You can call XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork on your main thread at the time of your choosing to get the latest snapshot of the state that Multiplayer Manager is buffering for you behind the scenes.

Events and notifications

Multiplayer Manager defines a set of significant events (see XblMultiplayerEvent) and notifies the title via the XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork method when they happen. For example, events include remote players joining or leaving, member properties changing, or session state changing.

All Multiplayer Manager APIs are asynchronous. The XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork method returns a list of events when these asynchronous operations are completed. Your title should handle these events appropriately for your situation. For more details, see the XblMultiplayerEvent class documentation.

Each returned XblMultiplayerEvent includes an EventArgsHandle, which you must use to get the appropriate args for the event type. For example, if the XblMultiplayerEventType is MemberJoined, you would could call XblMultiplayerEventArgsMembersCount and XblMultiplayerEventArgsMembers.

The following example demonstrates using XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork to handle events.

Flat C API

size_t eventCount{ 0 };
const XblMultiplayerEvent* events{ nullptr };
HRESULT hr = XblMultiplayerManagerDoWork(&events, &eventCount);
if (FAILED(hr))
{
    // Handle failure.
}

for (auto i = 0u; i < eventCount; ++i)
{
    switch (events[i].EventType)
    {
        case XblMultiplayerEventType::MemberJoined:
        {
            // Handle MemberJoined.
            size_t memberCount = 0;
            hr = XblMultiplayerEventArgsMembersCount(events[i].EventArgsHandle, &memberCount);
            assert(SUCCEEDED(hr));

            std::vector<XblMultiplayerManagerMember> members(memberCount);
            hr = XblMultiplayerEventArgsMembers(events[i].EventArgsHandle, memberCount, members.data());
            assert(SUCCEEDED(hr));
            ...

            break;
        }

        case XblMultiplayerEventType::SessionPropertyChanged:
        {
            // Handle SessionPropertyChanged.
            const char* changedProperty{ nullptr };
            hr = XblMultiplayerEventArgsPropertiesJson(events[i].EventArgsHandle, &changedProperty);
            assert(SUCCEEDED(hr));
            ...

            break;
        }
        ...
    }
}

For more information, see the following:

Scenarios

This section covers common scenarios and the APIs that you would call in each scenario. Some information about what Multiplayer Manager is doing behind the scenes is also provided.

For a high-level overview of the API, see Multiplayer Manager API overview.

What Multiplayer Manager doesn't do

Multiplayer Manager makes it much easier to implement multiplayer scenarios and abstracts some of the data from you. However, Multiplayer Manager doesn't handle the following:

  • Persistent online server games, such as massively multiplayer online (MMO) games or other game types that require large sessions (more than 100 players in a session)
  • Server-to-server session management
  • Throttling of MPSD calls to adhere to Fine-Grained Rate Limiting
  • Mixing of Multiplayer service APIs and Multiplayer Manager APIs

Note

Multiplayer Manager isn't restricted to any specific network technology and should work with any network communication layer.

Resources

For a working example of the API, see the NetRumble Sample.

For API documentation, see multiplayer_manager_c. You can also view the multiplayer_manager_c.h header file.

If you have questions, feedback, or have issues using Multiplayer Manager, contact your developer account manager (DAM) or post a support thread on the forums at https://forums.xboxlive.com.