Game Integration Overview
For the best hosting results and for full control over your game servers and clients, you can integrate some functions of our platform within your game. Although this is not technically necessary, it is recommended.
Game Server Orchestrator
A smooth release of a multiplayer game with an efficient game hosting solution can help with its success. i3D.net understands the importance of that. To help burgeoning game studios in that endeavor, i3D.net offers a new product: The Game Server Orchestrator. The Game Server Orchestrator is a fully customizable game hosting solution that offers scalability solutions (scaling up / down game servers based on demand), health checks, monitoring, and more.
Matchmaking & game server allocation
If your game allows for players in a particular region to play against each other, or players at a similar level of experience to play against each other, you normally create a matchmaker that will decide where a player will end up and who he or she will play against.
Especially the geographical decisions in this process are relevant to our platform. You will want to request a game server from the platform in a certain region.
Ping beacon request response
We have a core part of the i3D platform which are ping beacons. The ping beacons examine User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic to measure latency with a multiplayer games' UDP transport. We operate these beacons in multiple regions so that your game operates optimally. Using a ping beacon will measure the time of sending a UDP message and when you receive a response. In short, the quicker the response received, the lower the latency you have for your games.
Management protocol
A management protocol is a means for a game server to be queried or controlled by an external source. In this case the external source is i3D.net's ONE Game Hosting service. A management protocol can be used to query a game server for live game related information (status queries returning the number of players, the current map, rules, etc), or for sending commands for e.g. a graceful (soft) stop.
Game server run-status update
Many game servers have an initialization process to go through when starting up. This has the effect that the game server will not actually be usable during this initialization period. Our platform should know about this, otherwise it will assume the game server is ready to accept clients immediately after starting. For this to be possible, your game server can let our back end know when it is ready to accept players. We refer to this as a "game server run-status update" and can be performed by having the game server make an API call either towards our public API, or locally towards our Host Agent.