The purpose of Groups is to segregate different types of Rooms (for example all Poker Rooms, from all Lobby Rooms) so that users can just see one portion of the full Room List, based on their current activity.<\/p>\n
For example, if your server hosts a number of different games there’s no need for players interested in playing Game A<\/strong> to see and receive updates for all Game B<\/strong> Rooms. Instead clients can dynamically subscribe and unsubscribe to Room Groups according to their interest, thus avoiding to deal with huge Room Lists.<\/p>\n The first thing to configure is your Zone’s “Default Groups” setting, which specifies which Room Groups are going to be auto-subscribed upon login by any User.<\/p>\n To do this open the AdminTool<\/strong> > Zone Configurator<\/strong> and edit the field making sure only the Groups that are strictly needed are\u00a0subscribed to. If your application doesn’t require Users to see any Rooms when they have just logged in, you can leave the field empty.<\/p>\n Once the User is subscribed to one or more Room Groups he will start to receive a number of events that can be tweaked in several different ways.<\/p>\n The first two events (ROOM_ADD<\/strong> \/ ROOM_REMOVE<\/strong>) are mandatory: they represent the essential mechanisms by which the Room List is kept synchronized with Users. There’s not much we can tweak for these two: we either receive them or not, and this is based on the choice of subscribing\/unsubscribing to a specific group.<\/p>\n ROOM_VARIABLES_UPDATE\u00a0<\/strong>is a different beast: normally Room Variables are only visible to the Users that are joined in a specific Room. People from “outside” don’t see the variables and don’t receive any updates.<\/p>\n Additionally, RoomVariables can be marked as global\u00a0<\/strong>which makes them visible from outside without the need of joining the target Room. This can be useful to provide extra information to players before they choose which Room they want to join. This however\u00a0has a small cost: every global Room Variable update is dispatched to all people subscribed to the Room Group.<\/p>\n We highly recommend to keep this in mind when working with global Room Variables, especially if they are intended for very frequent updates, as this may potentially use significant resources.<\/p>\n Finally we have the\u00a0USER_COUNT_UPDATE\u00a0<\/strong>event which keeps everyone in sync about the number of players and spectators in every Room. In high traffic situations these events can be generated every few milliseconds causing a lot of small packets to be sent continuously to all clients.<\/p>\n To optimize this event, SmartFoxServer provides a specific User Count Event Throttler<\/strong> which allows the system to aggregate multiple updates at\u00a0specific intervals before sending them. This way we\u00a0can save significant bandwidth at the cost of a slightly “less real-time” user count updates (which is usually acceptable).<\/p>\n By default we recommend to set the Throttler to 1000ms. The setting is per Zone and it can be changed from the Admin Tool<\/strong> > Zone Configurator<\/strong>, under the Advanced<\/strong> tab.<\/p>\n There is one last interesting concept that is also worth discussing, which involves avoiding Room Lists altogether. A number of games and applications may not require that the client knows about the details of every Room available, at all.<\/p>\n The Room List is essentially needed only when the joining process is left to the User entirely, but there are many scenarios in which the server side logic will decide where to join the players instead.<\/p>\n Let’s explore a simple use case:<\/p>\n![\"room-groups-diag\"](\"http:\/\/smartfoxserver.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/room-groups-diag.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"DefRoomGroups\"](\"http:\/\/smartfoxserver.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/DefRoomGroups.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00bb\u00a0Fine tuning Room Events<\/h3>\n
\n
![\"ucount-throttler\"](\"http:\/\/smartfoxserver.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/ucount-throttler.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00bb\u00a0Working without Room Lists<\/h3>\n
![\"simple-use-case\"](\"http:\/\/smartfoxserver.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/simple-use-case.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n