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Friends

Redwood comes with a Friends system, which allows you to make friend requests, respond to friend requests, and block players. This system may seem simple, but it'll be useful for future features such as chat and parties. The Friends system also includes tracking the online state of your friends.

The friends system is hosted within the Director rather than the Realm, which means your friends are the same no matter which Realm you're connected to. Friends are made with player identities rather than player characters, so you your friend is accessible from the same username regardless of which character they're playing as currently.

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The RPG Template (as of 3.1) comes with a great example of the friends system. The template shows the friend UI widget via an interactable in the village zone (mainly to keep the template simpler), but you could program this UI to work in the title screen and HUD too.

Unreal Functions​

The main functions for the Friend system are available via the URedwoodClientGameSubsystem in the plugin:

  • ListFriends: Lists your friends; it takes a filter so you can show all relationships, just the pending invites, etc
  • RequestFriend: Initiate a friend request
  • RemoveFriend: Remove an existing friend
  • RespondToFriendRequest: Accept/deny a friend request or rescind your previous request; denying will allow them to send another request
  • SetPlayerBlocked: Blocks players from sending more friend requests

We've also provided a SearchForPlayers function where you can get the player ID used for requesting a friend. You can provide a username (what they use to login with) or nickname (defaults to the username, Steam auth will set this to their Steam alias)

Online State​

Players can see the online state of accepted friends. This state is non-null only in the ListFriends response. The struct has two booleans bOnline and bPlaying. bOnline means that they have at least logged into the Director. bPlaying can only be true if bOnline is true. bPlaying == true means they're in a game server and the OnlineStateRealm variable is valid. bPlaying == false && bOnline == true means they're not in a game server but connected to the Director (likely just sitting in the main menu/title screen).

The OnlineStateRealm variable includes all of their current online status: RealmName, ProxyId, ZoneName, ShardName, and CharacterId (which is the PlayerCharacter that they're currently playing as).