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Joining lobbies and connection strings

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Players join lobbies by providing the lobby service with a lobby's "connection string", an opaque identifier which grants membership to the lobby.

Players can discover connection strings and join lobbies in the following ways.

  1. By using in-game invites—A member of a lobby may invite another player to that lobby directly via the lobby service. This will share the lobby's connection string with the invited player. These invites work cross-platform but only work in-game. For more information, see Lobby invites
  2. By using platform-provided invites—Members of the lobby can directly share the lobby's connection string with other players over platform-specific invite mechanisms. These invites will not work cross-platform but can be received without the recipient already running the game.
  3. By searching for available lobbies with FindLobbies and joining an available lobby
  4. By sharing the lobby's connection string via any out-of-band, custom discovery mechanism

NOTE: Only players (i.e. title_player_account PlayFab entities) can join lobbies as members. Game servers (i.e. game_server PlayFab entities) cannot join lobbies as members. For more information on the how game servers interact with lobbies, see Game Servers and Lobbies.

Connection strings and Lobby IDs

Aside from connection strings, lobbies have another identifer known as LobbyId. LobbyId is the unique identifier for a lobby. Titles may use LobbyId to distinguish between multiple lobbies that a player is in, but LobbyIds cannot be used to join the lobbies or directly query them for any information which requires membership. Therefore, your title doesn't have to keep LobbyId a secret. Connection strings, on the other hand, grant access to lobbies so care should be taken to keep from exposing them to unwanted, outside parties.

Example joining a lobby using the Lobby and Matchmaking SDK

Here's a brief snippet which demonstrates passing a connection string to the PFMultiplayerJoinLobby API provided by the SDK.

In this snippet, the connection string could be provided by any of the discovery mechanisms mentioned above: in-game invites, platform-specific invites, or filtered lobby searches.

// Initialize the member properties for the newly joining member
const char* playerColorPropertyKey = "PlayerColor";
const char* playerColorPropertyValue = MyGame::GetPlayerColorString(localUser);

PFLobbyJoinConfiguration joinConfig;
joinConfig.memberPropertyCount = 1;
joinConfig.memberPropertyKeys = &playerColorPropertyKey;
joinConfig.memberPropertyValues = &playerColorPropertyValue;

// Join the lobby using the connection string
HRESULT hr = PFMultiplayerJoinLobby(
    g_pfmHandle,
    &localUser,
    connectionString,
    &joinConfig,
    nullptr,
    nullptr);

See also