Why Leaderboards? Leaderboards are one of the oldest that are used to increase the level of competition amongst players. Global scoreboards generate longer gameplay times and appeal to the majority of player segments. In addition, leaderboards help increase player engagement and retention by motivating them to achieve a higher rank. If a player slips down in the ranks, they will usually try to re-assert their position at the top. social features in video games You can build leaderboards that by using PubNub. Realtime scorekeeping is important since it gives users instant feedback which increases gamer satisfaction. update in realtime Setting Up Unity To start out, check out my and clone/download the repo. If you don’t already have Unity installed, install it . The repo contains an Assets folder which contains all of the Project Files. Open up Unity, and go to and select the folder. It will take some time to load the project in Unity. When it completes, open up the Assets folder in your tab, and double-click on the Unity Scene. GitHub here File -> Open Project Project LeaderBoard When you click on the scene, you should see this: LeaderBoard To try out the demo, click the Play button at the top. If you get the following error, follow the steps below: Scene ‘LeaderBoard’ couldn’t be loaded because it has not been added to the build settings or the AssetBundle has not been loaded. To fix this, go to . Click the button. Then go back to your Project tab, and double-click on the , go back to your Build Settings, and click once again. Then in your Project Tab, double-click on the LeaderBoard scene again and run the project. File -> Build Settings Add Open Scenes LeaderBoard Add Open Scenes Running the Project Now that your project is all set up, click the button. When you run the project, a PubNub is sent to the PubNub Function.As you can see in the screenshot below, when there are no scores stored in the , it will fill out every unfilled entry with “unset”. Below I’m going to add some more entries to the KV store by typing in a username and score. Run Fire message KV Store Let’s add more entries. Lara, James, and Bob just got added to the high score list below. Now let’s add Stephen to the list. As you can see, since his score is higher than Bob’s but lower than James, he is placed in the 5th spot. All players that are connected to the will see this score update in realtime. This logic is all done in the PubNub Function using the KV Store and array sorting. Click the try our demo button below to check out how it works. game Open up two windows to see the high scores updating in real time How Does it Work? Creating a leaderboard can be a complicated task since you want all users to see the same information as new scores are added to the list. Using PubNub and PubNub Functions makes creating custom leaderboards for your application seamless. In the main folder, I created a script called which handles all the sending and receiving of data. In the function, we start out by defining some components and variables. The current demo is using my personal pub/sub keys. You will have to go in and replace the pub/sub keys to your own which you can find in the . Create a new application in the admin dashboard and copy your pub/sub keys into the code. leaderBoard Start() PubNub Admin Dashboard leaderBoard.cs In the code above, we set each players UUID to a random number. However, if you were creating your game you would want to associate this number to a unique username so that way people can’t have the same usernames in your realtime leaderboard. The code below is the entire document. When the script runs for the first time, it initializes PubNub and sends a Fire message to the PubNub Function. This fire object tells the Function to send back the most recent data which is stored in the database (KV Store). When the client gets a response from the PubNub Function, it runs the and iterates through the dictionary, replacing any data that has changed since the last update. leaderBoard.cs pubnub.SubscribeCallback The function takes the information you input in the input fields and publishes that data to the PubNub Function which then updates all clients currently subscribed to . TaskOnClick my_channel2 In order to make the leaderboards work, we now have to set up a PubNub Function. To make a Function, go to the PubNub Admin Dashboard, and click on your application. On the left-hand side, click the Functions button, and create a new Module. Make sure you are listening to the correct channel name, in this case, I called my channel “ “. my_channel In the function, we first have to import the KV Store and PubNub dependencies. Next we parse the message received from the Unity client, and place the contents of the message into variables called username and score. JSON Next we use to check if there is any data stored in the KV store. If there isn’t, we use to create a string format of how the data will be structured. Once the data is in the KV store, we iterate through the array using We use the prototype since we want to be able to return true at the end of the loop to cancel out of the loop once the entry has been correctly replaced. When the loop has been completed, it sends the new updated values to all clients subscribed to by sending a pubnub.publish message. db.get db.set value.score.some(item => {});. my_channel2 That’s it, folks! It’s super easy to create a custom leaderboard using PubNub and Unity. Debugging and Building When you go to build your project, you may run into an error that says: error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'TestTools' does not exist in the namespace 'UnityEngine'. Are you missing a reference? CS0246: The type or namespace name 'NUnit' could not be found. Are you missing an assembly reference? To fix this problem, go to: Window -> Test Runner -> Select Play Mode You will be asked to enable playmode. Then reset the editor. Now when you go to build your project, those errors should be removed. Wrapping Up Setting up PubNub with Unity is straightforward and seamless. Additionally, if you have millions of users playing your game at the same time, PubNub scales and supports that latency and traffic. To download the Unity SDK, visit our . You can download my demo project on my . Thanks for reading cheers! Unity documentation GitHub here Originally published at www.pubnub.com .

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