What is a "Presence" Session?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hey there, i just finished the Wiki Page for the Session handling in C++,
but i couldn’t get to know what a “Presence” Session is. Epic it self set it to true
in the ShooterGame.

It is an “FOnlineSessionSettings” boolean attribute:

SessionSettings = MakeShareable(new FOnlineSessionSettings());
SessionSettings->bUsesPresence = bIsPresence;

When translating it into german, it makes no real sense, because i have no idea what a “non presence” Session would be :X

The documentation says “Whether to display user presence information or not”. Does that mean, if i set this to true, i can get Information from the User who created this Session and otherwise not (when searching)?

Maybe someone can help me out here (:

Kind regards

eXi

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2

I was trying to figure this out as well.

I am not an expert, but looking at the code it relates to enabling other users to see/join the local user via the clients of online services external to your game (XBoxLive, PSN, Steam et al). Generally this would be friends of the user on a given service OnlineSessionSettings.bAllowJoinViaPresenceFriendsOnly.

eg. bUsesPresence seems to flag FOnlineSession::HasPresence() as true which is used to conditionally open a lobby overlay for the Steam backend.

See also FOnlineUserPresence and IOnlineSubsystem::GetPresenceInterface().
Note that GetPresenceInterface() does not currently seem to be implemented for any of the backends (including Steam). ShooterGame sets this presence info in AShooterPlayerController::SetPause() so it must be used on some platforms. I don’t have the XBox or PS4 source code, so more may be happening in there.

3

Thanks for the detailed post and the information. That’s what i thought about it too. I looked into the API and in the “FOnlineUserPresence” was a comment to a function that said it would return information about the clients of a given session (or something like that). So it really seems to be that kinda stuff.

So i guess with that you can use friendlists and “is the my friend currently in a game” and things like that.

But i would still wait for a Staff answer. Maybe that would clear things up.

Thanks so far!

4

Basically it reports what client is doing in a game right now. You can see it used in Epic’s Friend list in the launcher:

106428-ss+(2016-09-10+at+01.29.05).png

The “Plankerton: Retrieve the Data, Very Low Threat” is the presence string here.

5

OK, that’s pretty straight forward, presence reports what the user is doing in game. But how can Sessions use presence? What does the Online Session Setting bUsesPresence do?

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