Friends

The Beamable Friends feature allows players to connect with other players and manage friendships through various social interactions. Players can send friend invites, view pending invites, cancel invites, reject invites, accept invites, view friends, remove friends, block players, and unblock players.

The Friends feature is accessible via the BeamContext object, and is a code-first solution.

this is a list of the main concepts used in the Friends feature:

Term	Description
Friend	A player that has accepted a friend invite from the current user.
Blocked Player	A player that will be prevented from sending friend invites to the current user. Blocked players cannot be friends.
Sent Invite	A pending invite from the current user to another player. The other player must accept the invite before the friendship can begin.
Received Invite	A pending invite for the current user, from another player. The user must accept the invite before the friendship can begin.

Friends API

Friends can be accessed directly through the ISocialApi interface, or conveniently through the BeamContext.Social accessor. The following samples illustrate how to achieve common use cases by using the BeamContext.

Viewing Social Data

The BeamContext.Social returns an instance of PlayerSocial which is a serializable object you can view in the Unity inspector. The PlayerSocial object is an observable type, which means that Beamable will update it silently in the background as friendships are initiated, made, or broken.

Beamable Observables

You can use C# events to listen for changes to the PlayerSocial object. Use the ctx.Social.OnUpdated event to receive any update. The fields themselves also have events, such as ctx.Social.Friends.OnDataUpdated.

using Beamable.Player;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    public PlayerSocial social;

    async void Start()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;
        social = ctx.Social;
    }
}

There are 4 main resources associated with a PlayerSocial,

1. The PlayerSocial.Friends list, which is an observable list of friends.
2. The PlayerSocial.Blockedlist, which is an observable list of blocked players.
3. The PlayerSocial.SentInvites list, which is an observable list of friend invites sent from the current player.
4. The PlayerSocial.ReceivedInvites list, which is an observable list of friend invites sent to the current player.

Experiment with Multiple Beam Context objects

Validating friend invites can be hard when you're just one developer on one machine. Luckily, you can create multiple BeamContext instances at once in the same gameplay session. These samples all use BeamContext.Default for simplicity, but you can change them to use BeamContext.ForPlayer("player1"), and BeamContext.ForPlayer("player2") to simulate two unique players.

Sending an Invite

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    public long playerToBefriend;

    [ContextMenu("Invite")]
    async void Invite()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;
        await ctx.Social.Invite(playerToBefriend);
    }
}

Accepting an Invite

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    [ContextMenu("Accept")]
    async void Accept()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;
        await ctx.Social.ReceivedInvites[0].AcceptInvite();
    }
}

Removing a Friend

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    [ContextMenu("RemoveFriend")]
    async void RemoveFriend()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;
        await ctx.Social.Friends[0].Unfriend();
    }
}

Canceling Sent Invite

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    [ContextMenu("Cancel")]
    async void Cancel()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;
        await ctx.Social.SentInvites[0].Cancel();
    }
}

Blocking a Player

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    public long playerIdToBlock;
    [ContextMenu("Block")]
    async void Block()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;

        await ctx.Social.BlockPlayer(playerIdToBlock);
    }
}

Unblocking a Player

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    [ContextMenu("Unblock")]
    async void Unblock()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;

        await ctx.Social.Blocked[0].Unblock();
    }
}

Importing Friends from Facebook

A player who has associated a Facebook credential with their account may automatically import Facebook friends. Facebook friends who have also linked a Facebook credential will be listed as Beamable friends. When one player imports Facebook friends, all imported friends will have the initiating player as a friend as well.

using Beamable;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    public string facebookAuthToken;
    [ContextMenu("ImportFriends")]
    async void ImportFriends()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        await ctx.OnReady;

        await ctx.Social.ImportThirdPartyFriends(facebookAuthToken);
    }
}

Presence

A friend may have a presence object that describes the friend's online status. Friend presence is accessible directly from the PlayerFriend structure, or by using the ctx.Presence SDK.

Listening for friend presence changes

var ctx = await BeamContext.ForPlayer(code).Instance;

ctx.Social.FriendPresenceChanged += friend =>
{
  Debug.Log($"{ctx.UserId} saw friend {friend.UserId} go online=[{friend.Presence.status}] - desc=[{friend.Presence.description}]");
};

Seting Your Current Presence

var ctx = await BeamContext.ForPlayer(code).Instance;
await ctx.Presence.SetPlayerStatus(PresenceStatus.Away, "away from the computer");

Direct Access

While the previous section is the preferred way to interact with Beamable friends, you can also access the API layer directly. This approach requires much more effort to manage.

using Beamable;
using Beamable.Common.Api.Social;
using UnityEngine;

public class FriendsSample : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Direct()
    {
        var ctx = BeamContext.Default;
        var socialApi = ctx.ServiceProvider.GetService<ISocialApi>();
    }
}