Google Play Game Services multiplayer with Activity switching

Question

In my Android game I have a turn-based multiplayer. Users wait for opponents in the lobby and whenever exactly 3 are matched, they go to a new game room together, which is another Activity than the lobby.

The docs suggest to let the Activities extend BaseGameActivity. But as I switch the Activity while players are already connected, don'I need to place the connectivity parts in a Service which my Activity then binds to?

Has anyone tried already with Game Services? How to begin if I can't use BaseGameActivity?

Answer 1

I am in the process of developing a multiplayer game using these new Google Play Game Services. It includes achievements and leaderboards, along with multiplayer.

From the button click sample project, I found that they (Google) used fragments extensively, and stayed within the bounds of a single activity. In my custom game, I jump between activities without a problem.

You'll need to keep a few portions of Google Play Game Services objects around, but a service might be overkill, unless your game requires long-running non-UI code to be executed. From what I've experienced, if you switch between activities, you'll want to keep the id of the Room(s) and participant id(s) that are currently involved in the game.

Since the "connectivity parts" are stateless, just reconnect as needed. You can even pass the room/participant id(s) in to each activity via the Intent bundle (or use the singleton pattern approach). This way, you'll save on battery life, performance, etc.

Answer 2

So, one of the reasons we wrote all the Google Play game services samples as single-Activity games is because switching between Activities require you to disconnect from the GamesClient and connect a new one from the new Activity.

So using Fragments is probably the easiest way to go about this. It's also pretty clean and allows you to make a tablet layout by combining them if you want to.

In particular, if you are setting up a multiplayer game, disconnecting will disconnect you from the room, so you can't switch to a different Activity after starting the handshake :-)

Answer 3

The documentation explains how to use the Game Services without the BaseGameActivity whenever is needed.

For example, during signin:

https://developers.google.com/games/services/training/signin

Clicking the Sign in button should initiate the sign in flow. If you are using the BaseGameActivity base class provided in the samples, simply call the beginUserInitiatedSignIn() method. Otherwise, you must manually call the connect() method of your GamesClient object.

For your specific question, I don't think it is an issue, all the control is inside Google Play, you just need to get the GamesClient and as far as I understood, the connection made on one activity will be there if you access it from another activity (but I didn't test the multiplayer yet).