Friends

Redwood comes with a Friends system, which allows players to make friend requests, respond to friend requests, and block players. The Friends system also includes tracking the online state of your friends (whether they're online, and which server they're playing on).

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 between PlayerIdentity accounts rather than PlayerCharacters, so your friend is the same person regardless of which character they're currently playing. (If you want a character-based list instead, see Realm Contacts.)

Because friends live in the Director, the whole system works as soon as the player has logged in; they don't need to be connected to a realm or a game server. You can build your friends UI in the main menu, in an in-game HUD, or both.

Unreal Functions

The functions for the Friends system are available on the client subsystem (URedwoodClientGameSubsystem). Each has a matching Blueprint async node of the same name:

Function	What it does
SearchForPlayers(UsernameOrNickname, bIncludePartialMatches, OnOutput)	Find players by username (what they log in with) or nickname (defaults to the username; Steam and Epic set it to the player's Steam/Epic display name). Returns FRedwoodPlayer structs with each player's PlayerId.
ListFriends(Filter, OnOutput)	Lists your relationships; the ERedwoodFriendListType filter selects all relationships, only accepted friends, pending requests, blocked players, etc.
RequestFriend(OtherPlayerId, OnOutput)	Send a friend request
RespondToFriendRequest(OtherPlayerId, bAccept, OnOutput)	Accept or deny a friend request, or rescind a request you sent; denying allows them to send another request
RemoveFriend(OtherPlayerId, OnOutput)	Remove an existing friend
SetPlayerBlocked(OtherPlayerId, bBlocked, OnOutput)	Block (or unblock) a player, which stops their friend requests and text chat DMs

Each FRedwoodPlayer has a FriendshipState (Active, PendingReceived, PendingSent, Blocked, etc.) describing your relationship with that player.

There are no events for friend requests in 5.0; refresh your list with List Friends when the UI opens (and periodically while it's open, if you want it to stay current).

Known issue (5.0.0)

List Friends only works with the All filter; every other filter fails backend validation. List All and filter the results yourself on each player's FriendshipState.

tip

If you want to let players add a friend (which requires a PlayerIdentity ID) by typing a PlayerCharacter name, use Get Character Data (GetCharacterData) with the character name (exact, but case-insensitive). The returned character includes the associated PlayerId (with the character's private data omitted), which you can pass to Request Friend.

A simple friends screen

1. When the screen opens, call List Friends with the All filter and sort the results by FriendshipState into sections: friends (Active), incoming requests (PendingReceived), outgoing requests (PendingSent), and blocked (Blocked).
2. For incoming requests, show Accept and Deny buttons that call Respond to Friend Request with bAccept set accordingly, then refresh the list.
3. For an "Add friend" box, call Search for Players with the entered text (optionally with partial matches), show the results, and call Request Friend with the chosen player's PlayerId.
4. Add Remove and Block buttons to friends that call Remove Friend and Set Player Blocked.

Online State

Players can see the online state of accepted friends. This state is only filled in for friends in the ListFriends response. The FRedwoodPlayer struct has two booleans, bOnline and bPlaying:

• bOnline means they're logged in to 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 are connected to the Director (likely just sitting in the main menu/title screen).

The OnlineStateRealm variable includes their current location: RealmName, ProxyId, ZoneName, ShardName, and CharacterId (the PlayerCharacter that they're currently playing as). You could use ProxyId to let players join their friend's server with Join Proxy with Single Instance or Join Queue (see Joining a Server).