Friend-/Partyinvites with Photon

Questions & Answers
1

Hello there,

i am currently implementing a friendslist in my current project. For the Networking part i use Photon. The thing I stumbled upon is the following:

Even though there is a way to find the online/room/lobby status of friends in my “friendslist”, i can’t find a method for “partyinvites” or “friendinvites”. Basic idea would be e.g. click a button and friend xy get’s notified that he/she got invited into a party or my friendslist, where xy can press accept or decline.
So far i’d have to use third party communication to manually exchange each others status (in party/not in party/friendslist).
So i can add people to a friendslist or a party but as a user i have no idea if they have me in theirs as well.

I want to be able to do “invites” while not in a lobby and/or room. So when i am just connected to the photon master server.

I have also stated this question in the photon-forum here, but so far have not recieved an answer there.

Thanks in advance!

2

After quite some searching i have come to 2 possible solutions:

1: For a partyinvite i create a Room at the Party-Leaders client. In this room it is possible to reserve slots for certain players. Each player can search for rooms with reserved slots for themselves. Thus i can handle finding a room with a reserved slot as a “party invite”.
(I personally don’t like this approach and will not further implement/research it)

2: Implement the Photon Chat system and use it to send custom rpc-like commands to other players. (e.g. "\invite ")
So far this is the only option i found that enables one to communicate with other players without beeing in the same room/lobby.