For instance, I have the player1 and player2 fields because the game can only be played by 2 players. Depending on your game, this could be very different. Obviously, this is a structure that worked for a simple game like Air Tactics. They also contain information about the status of the game( finished) and the creation date( created). The documents in the games collection represent all the games that were started by players and contain information about the players that joined the game( participants, player1, player2) and about the actions they made during it(in the moves field).

There is a collection of games, a collection of players and I also added 2 duplicates of these ( test_games and test_players) to test changes without affecting production. Set up Firestoreįirebase already has great tutorials on how to do this here for a lot of languages and platforms: This high level discussion might be a bit hard to understand so let’s get to an example. Firestore has done this work for us under the hood and all we need to do is use their SDK and set up a listener on the document we are interested in getting updated about. And you can implement this without polling, managing sockets or implementing a round-robin. What this means for us is that if you create a game document, and 2(or more) users are actively listening to it, whenever one user changes the state of the game, the others will be updated about that change in real-time. Ok, so how do we actually use Firestore in our multiplayer game?įirestore is a NoSQL database that allows real-time sync. Anyway, the main reason I chose Firestore and I suggest you do the same is that it’s the newer version and I assume Google will stop supporting Realtime Database at some point and only focus on Firestore. Firestore is also better optimized to retrieve only the information you need, thus reducing costs. Implementation wise, they are very similar, with Firestore allowing queries that are a bit more complex than Realtime Database. Firebase offers 2 options in terms of realtime databases: their original Firebase Realtime Database and the new Firestore.

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