How can I make the Play Game Services not automatically sign in at the startup?

Question

Google provides the BaseGameUtils library, and recommend us to extends its BaseGameActivity. However, this class makes the game automatically sign in whenever the game is started. If the player does not want to or cannot connect to his Google account, this can be very time consuming at the beginning of the game.

So I dont' want this feature. Instead, I want to provide a sign in button. The player is connected only when he click that button. And from that point on, every time the player starts the game, he is automatically connected to his Google account without clicking any button. How can I do this?

Answer 1

OK, I have figured it out, by default, the maximum auto sign-in times is 3, which means if the user cancels 3 times, then the app will never again (unless you clear the app's data) automatically sign in. It's stored in GameHelper.java

 // Should we start the flow to sign the user in automatically on startup? If so, up to  // how many times in the life of the application?  static final int DEFAULT_MAX_SIGN_IN_ATTEMPTS = 3;  int mMaxAutoSignInAttempts = DEFAULT_MAX_SIGN_IN_ATTEMPTS; 

And it also provides a function to set this maximum number

public void setMaxAutoSignInAttempts(int max) {         mMaxAutoSignInAttempts = max; } 

So if you don't want any automatic signing-in attempt at all, just call this function

This is if you don't want to extends BaseGameActivity

gameHelper = new GameHelper(this, GameHelper.CLIENT_GAMES); gameHelper.enableDebugLog(true); gameHelper.setup(this); gameHelper.setMaxAutoSignInAttempts(0); 

Or if you extends BaseGameActivity

getGameHelper().setMaxAutoSignInAttempts(0); 

Answer 2

In the GameHelper.java file there is a boolean attribute called mConnectOnStart that by default it is set to true. Just change it to false instead:

boolean mConnectOnStart = false; 

Additionally, there is a method provided for managing this attribute from the outside of the class:

// Not recommended for general use. This method forces the "connect on start" // flag to a given state. This may be useful when using GameHelper in a  // non-standard sign-in flow. public void setConnectOnStart(boolean connectOnStart) {     debugLog("Forcing mConnectOnStart=" + connectOnStart);     mConnectOnStart = connectOnStart; } 

You can use the method above in order to customize your sign in process. In my case, similar to you, I don't want to auto connect the very first time. But if the user was signed in before, I do want to auto connect. To make this possible, I changed the getGameHelper() method that is located in the BaseGameActivity class to this:

public GameHelper getGameHelper() {     if (mHelper == null) {         mHelper = new GameHelper(this, mRequestedClients);         mHelper.enableDebugLog(mDebugLog);          googlePlaySharedPref = getSharedPreferences("GOOGLE_PLAY",                 Context.MODE_PRIVATE);         boolean wasSignedIn = googlePlaySharedPref.getBoolean("WAS_SIGNED_IN", false);         mHelper.setConnectOnStart(wasSignedIn);     }     return mHelper; } 

Every time, getGameHelper() method is called from onStart() in BaseGameActivity. In the code above, I just added the shared preference to keep if the user was signed in before. And called the setConnectOnStart() method according to that case.

Finally, don't forget to set the "WAS_SIGNED_IN" (or something else if you defined with different name) shared preference to true after user initiated sign in process. You can do this in the onSignInSucceeded() method in the BaseGameActivity class.

Hope this will help you. Good luck.