Rooms are an essential feature of AppWarp. All the game play happens inside these rooms. A game can have multiple rooms and all players are distributed among these rooms. This way several players can play in groups simultaneously e.g. there are 20 players online in a card game but a game can have only 4 players at one time. Now these 20 players can be divided in 5 rooms, with each room having 4 players. All 5 rooms will have a game being played simultaneously in parallel. Hence, rooms in AppWarp is a great feature.

There are 2 types of rooms in AppWarp :

1. Static Room
2. Dynamic Room

Static Rooms

Static rooms are the one which never get destroyed until deleted manually by the developer. These rooms can only be created from AppHQ which is the dashboard provided by ShepHertz to maintain and monitor your games easily. Login to your dashboard from here.

Our Samples using Static Rooms :

iCouchApp: iCouchApp uses static rooms as it has fixed number of rooms specific to television shows which do not require to be created or deleted frequently. These rooms can be created from AppHQ and then they appear in the app without updating the client side application.

SpaceWarFare: SpaceWarFare is a basic MMO demo. Here only a single room was required to represent a world. In this sample, all players remain in a single world due to which a static room was good for this sample.

The Chat App: The Chat App has fixed number of chat rooms. Therefore static rooms were used.

Dynamic Rooms

Dynamic rooms are the ones which exist only till the time there are players inside these rooms. Once a room gets empty, it gets deleted. Dynamic rooms are created from the APIs provided through AppWarp SDK. Dynamic room can also be deleted from APIs.

Our Samples using Dynamic Rooms :

Catapult War: Catapult Wars is an interesting game where players can compete with their friends. Here a player creates a room, joins it and waits until his/her friend arrives and joins the same room.

Jungle Chaos: In Jungle Chaos, whenever a player arrives, we check if there is a player already waiting for an opponent. If a player is found, other players joins his room otherwise he creates another room and joins it until some other player comes and joins it.

When to use dynamic/static rooms?

Suppose there are 20 players online and a game can have 4 players at max. Now, when a 21st player comes online, you can create a new room at runtime and let that player join that new room. If a game gets over and all 4 players inside that room leave, the room will automatically get deleted. Therefore, dynamic rooms let your game distribute players more efficiently.

But if your game has a scenario where you want rooms to exist even when there is no one inside them, you can use static rooms e.g. in traditional chat applications where there were rooms like geeky, romance, funny, etc. and these were present even when they were empty.

Another useful case of static rooms can be: when you want to introduce a special room to users without changing the client applications e.g. you have a game already in production, and now you want your game to have a special room with more prize money. You can simply create a new room from AppHQ and it will start appearing in all user clients without rebuilding the client application. It can be useful when you want users to see different tournaments after every few days with new prizes.

You can adapt the rooms feature of AppWarp in several ways. Mixing it with other properties makes it more amazing. Try experimenting with our APIs and see what more you can do with it. Check out AppWarp’s Dev Center.

If you have any questions or need any further assistance, please feel free to write us at support@shephertz.com.