room level plugin for creating user variables

[danielrc]

Hi, is there any way to get a room level plugin to create user variables?
I've been using the userEnter method from basePlugin to see when users connect to the room. Now I need to add a user variable to the user that enters the room, is it possible to do this directly from within the room level plugin?

Thanks

[tcarr]

Yes, you can do this. I would strongly suggest not doing it completely inside the userEnter method, but you could call a method that then does a scheduledCallback for 1 ms later that does it. This puts it in a separate thread, which helps keep your plugin running smoothly.

Your code for actually doing the user variable would look like this:

UserVariableResponse uvr = getApi().createOrUpdateUserVariable(userName, nameOfVariable, esob);

These user variables will be seen by all users in the room, and a hacker could modify the client to change the user variable. For most games, it's better to store info that a hacker could ruin the game by changing on the server only, and have the plugin broadcast the info to the room when it changes. I normally create a Java object class called PlayerInfo, then have the game plugin maintain a ConcurrentHashMap<String, PlayerInfo> where the key is the username. Another alternative is to use UserPluginVariable or one of the other server-side-only variables that get attached to users.

[danielrc]

does the class UserVariableResponse mean that I have to actually make a request from the client for uvr to be assigned a value?

If I were to use UserPluginVariable, how would I do this?

What I'm trying to do is have every user that enters the room get a numeric value between 1 and 5 (my gamemanager is setup for max. 5 users). So I'm using a Stack, but I'm not sure how to assign these values, the UserPluginVariable seems like an interesting idea

[tcarr]

The plugin gets the UserVariableResponse, and then you can look at that response to make sure it's successful.

To use a user plugin variable, you create any Java Object you want to hold the data (or if it's just your numbers from 1 to 5 you could use Integer). Let's assume that you create a PlayerInfo object class. To set it you use something like this:

PlayerInfo pInfo = new PlayerInfo(... whatever the parameters are....);
getApi().setUserPluginVariable(userName, varName, pInfo);

Then to get it back again later:

PlayerInfo pInfo = (PlayerInfo) getApi().getUserPluginVariable(userName, varName);

This is if you want to be able to look up a user's value. If your game needs to be able to look up who is the user with value of 3, then you would need a data structure instead, unless you wanted to iterate through all the users in the room until you found the right one.