May 19th, 2020 Livestream

Snutt & Gafgar Talk: How Epic / Steam crossplay works

https://youtu.be/TM6DY2kEQ8E

Topics

• Features > Multiplayer > Crossplay

Transcript

no no no just kidding, yeah so that's that's one aspect like the online stuff then there's also the cross-play aspect as to like getting that to work yeah and that's that's the real like that's a big topic as well because of how the different platforms have support for different things and for example there is still an issue that we have are working around that we hope to solve in the future- I should I don't know if how much I should say but like it's it's essentially that you can't if you're don't own an application on on steam you can't start, the steam api, with that platform's id it's impossible you can't do it which means if you can't start an api you can't resolve the state of your friends even you can't even get your friends list normally you can do that through other means but if you get a friend's list how do you see what game they are in and so on you need to get their state and you can't do that unless you own it on steam, and that's like something we have to work around, and there might be solutions that are really good for it but but like one solution we are doing now that is that when you have a session up and running you have an id for that session and anyone that has that id can join you if you set that option of course, and that means that no matter what platform they're running on as long as they have they I that id they can join you so you don't need necessarily, the friendly store like their state you can join them just by knowing the session and that is exactly how a dedicated server would work as well you have the id of the server and that's how you can join it right so does that mean like when if you want to cross play you can't really do beyond the epic end and then like add in your steam friends it's the other way around or how does that yeah so right now when you're if you're using steam you can just say hey I want to connect, my epic account and then you log into epic and then you can be on both at the same time you don't have to own the game on epic to do that you just have to log in and that means you can get all epic friends and you can get all your steam friends in one list the issue is that your epic friends playing only on epic and doesn't own the game on steam will not actually be able to see your steam presence but they can see your epic presence so that kind of will work mostly seamless for for most people but there will be cases where where if you only own the game on epic and your friends only own it on steam then you will not be able to directly see your and he doesn't want to have a epic account so you can be friends in epic so you can't like connect that way you will have to use the session id you got it there's a question here on like do you guys have session passwords with the ids or because I assume there's there's author authentication with the login within the different or how does that work right now you have to just set, like yours your session to be, public er in a way not public but it's like it's final by a session id but it must be an exact match and this you don't have full control of the session id it needs to include, some characters that you don't actually have control over ensuring that it's a unique id and it's not too easy just to randomly find and that's all you need to join right now like the if if we run problems with that we'll I hope we can build on top of that and, it's just in general that like the steam issue with the like you're logging in on steam maybe there's a workaround for that as well but it's, it's not stuff like that are certain and there are different solutions so I can't really talk too much about that