We’re excited to announce new multiplayer features, available with our latest v31 release, that make it easier for your users to invite and join their friends in VR and improve their experience once they arrive. With these new additions, you can enable enhanced social interaction within your app and allow your biggest fans to easily share their enthusiasm for your game as they invite others to join them for a shared session. The new multiplayer features include:
This feature allows users to send pop-up invite notifications to friends, people they recently played with, or in-game connections. If they accept, the invitation will bring the user directly to the inviter’s location in-app. This dialog can be launched directly within the application or from the universal menu. The “Invite to App” feature is available for all developers, and additional information on the APIs to support this feature are available
here.
We’re also making it easier for your users to set up multiplayer sessions outside the headset. Invite Link, located in the Social tab in the Oculus mobile app on iOS or Android, generates custom Invite Links that users can share with others. Anyone that has the Invite Link can join them in the app. Both Invite Link and Parties, launch users into a Destination using the Group Presence API to make sure everyone ends up in the same session. Make sure that you configure your Destination to be deep linkable and support Invite Link.
Destinations, launched in 2020, are places in your app where groups of people can navigate and gather as they would in a lobby. This update allows your Destinations to be joinable, where players both in and outside of the app can find one another using the unique lobby session ID to match them together. Previously, Destinations was like having two coffee shops in the same mall; with joinable Destinations you can now let players warp to the specific coffee shop where their friend is so that they can order together. This flow forms the basis for synchronous social experiences like competitive multiplayer or cooperative collaboration.
Rejoin is a feature within the existing Join feature that allows you to display a dialog to users disconnected from a session. Your app still handles the actual flow of join and deep-linking, but the dialog relieves a lot of the friction on the user.
The App Roster shows the list of people that are present in the same location within your app. Everyone on the list should reflect another player they can speak to or interact with. Your game must keep all user group presence data up-to-date to accurately reflect the current list of users in the App Roster for the user to find.
Invokable Error Dialogs allow you to display generalized error messages to your users. Oculus’s
predefined error dialogs allow for consistent error handling and communication that cover a variety of situations.
Errors while trying to join friends during sessions can be frustrating, even more so if the user doesn’t get shown the appropriate error dialogue UI to know what went wrong. You can now launch a custom error dialog in-app, with UI that appropriately messages errors, such as a lobby unable to fit the size of a group or notifying a player that a tutorial must be completed first. This allows you to offer your players more consistent and actionable error handling and improve the overall quality of their experience.
With Webhooks, your server can receive a join_intent event when a user accepts an in-game invitation or rejoins a multiplayer game session. This information can be used to:
Notify users that a new player will be joining the destination.
Reserve a slot in the lobby for the incoming player using the included lobby_session_id and match_session_id.
Handle additional server-side logic that can be completed in anticipation of the joining player.
Mic Switcher is another new feature that supports the multiplayer experience by allowing users to hear their party as they join apps and toggle their microphone between their party within the app. For more information, please see the
documentation.
In addition to the multiplayer improvements listed above, you can bring non-active players into your app by adding a spectator mode. Released with our v29 update, Spectator Camera allows you to show a third person view to spectators watching casting on mobile or web. This feature can be used in conjunction with the existing first-person view, allowing the viewer to switch between perspectives for optimal viewing angles. Adding Spectator Camera functionality to applications can result in a more engaging shared experience with friends, family, and audiences. See our
Spectator Camera documentation for more details, including a Unity sample for easy integration.
We’re looking forward to seeing how you incorporate these features. Be on the lookout for future multiplayer updates and announcements throughout 2021. More information about how to integrate these features into your apps can be found in our
documentation.
