iPhone p2p - Is there a way to connect to more than 1 devices?

Question

Is it possible to connect to more than 1 devices using the new GameKit framework? Till now all the examples I've seen show how we can connect to 1 device. Even the default connection interface lets the user select just one connect.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There's a fairly good overview here at the following link of how to configure and use GameKit for your App.

• GameKit Programming Guide: Peer-to-Peer Connectivity

Unfortunately, you will not be able to use the GKPeerPickerController standard UI picker to configure the GKSession instance for you if you want to support more than 2 devices. Instead, you must develop your own UI elements to setup and configure the connections between the master/server and the multiple clients.

Here's a simple way to enable GameKit for more than 2 devices:

When you initialize a GKSession instance with initWithSessionID:displayName:sessionMode, use:

• sessionMode:GKSessionModeServer for the server/master
• sessionMode:GKSessionModeClient for the other (multiple) clients

sessionMode:GKSessionModePeer is the 3rd available option and is the option used in most sample code provided by Apple such as the GKTank demo.

Note: You can probably use GKSessionModePeer and still have a network of more than 2 devices since peer mode puts the device in server and client mode at the same time until a connection is made. Explicitly configuring one device as the server may simplify the setup which is useful for testing the GameKit API.

For the server:

GKSession *session = [[GKSession alloc] initWithSessionID:kTestSessionID displayName:nil sessionMode:GKSessionModeServer]; 

For the client(s):

GKSession *session = [[GKSession alloc] initWithSessionID:kTestSessionID displayName:nil sessionMode:GKSessionModeClient];