I am considering developing a Unity game with Facebook integration, but I am not sure what technology / plugin I need.
In addition to the standard requirements - such as authenticate, show friends list etc - I wish to be able to transfer arbitrary data between Facebook friends - for example, so that a player can give some item to another player.
Does anyone have any experience with such implementation?
I mean, what do I need? Is it Facebook Graph API? Will Prime31 plugin provide this ability for me?
Or maybe I need to use a service such as parse.com?
If it’s a gift to another player that doesn’t have the game installed yet, there’s no clean way to do that. You can only invite them to play the game. You can use custom graph stories for this if it’s only to and from players that already have the game installed though. However it’s very inflexible even then and has to be basically “hard-coded” items. I would recommend using Neatplug Facebook plugin over Prime31 for sure. I have both. Neatplug saved me weeks of testing because more things are built in.
Also, we (Dark Tonic) happens to be developing a service to allow players to gift things to each other as well as message each other in-game and it will be available for beta soon if you are interested. The pricing when it’s live will be volume based. It will not be so expensive like the ROAR Engine though, and we will add other features as they are requested, when feasible. Our services will live in the cloud.
I actually want to exchange data between two people who have the game installed, and the gift was more of an example.
I am open to using a cloud service but to be honest, I would probably first try to do without.
No problem! For data to be exchanged between players, you’ll definitely need to use a hosted service of some sort to handle that, whether you write it yourself or not. Facebook can only handled very limited hard-coded scenarios by itself. If you would like us to add support for the sort of data you may want to our upcoming product, you can ping us at support@darktonic.com.
By the way, you wouldn’t have to write code to call the cloud service with our product, if that makes any difference. There’s a free plugin that handles all that for you making it dead simple.
When our product is available for beta, I’ll post back here for interested parties. It’s about 85% done right now. We’re code naming it “Killer Socializer” right now.