PlayFab Party chat permissions and muting

Overview

PlayFab Party gives you fine-grained control over how your players can communicate with each other's. Rather than specifying teams or channels, PlayFab Party requires that explicit permissions between each pair of chat controls be defined. The chat permissions system allows you to control incoming and outgoing voice communication as well as incoming text communication between any pair of chat controls.

Chat permissions

Communication between chat controls is disabled by default and it is up to the Game to set the right PartyChatPermissionOptions between each pair of chat controls. Chat permissions should reflect the relationship between each chat control as determined by the scenario you are trying to achieve. For example, in a team versus team scenario, you might want to set the chat permissions to allow all types of communication between members of the same team, block audio communication between members of opposing team, and allow receiving text between everyone in the session.

The following example shows how to enable all communication between a local and a remote chat control. The variable localChatControlA is pointing to a valid PartyLocalChatControl object while remoteChatControlB is pointing to a valid PartyChatControl object representing a chat control on a remote device.

PartyChatPermissionOptions allOptions = PartyChatPermissionOptions::SendAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveText;
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(remoteChatControlB, allOptions);

Note

Please note that chat permissions only apply locally. In the previous example, full bi-directional communication will only happen if remoteChatControlB is remotely configured to allow all communication with localChatControlA

Muting

Games also have the ability to mute outgoing audio (PartyLocalChatControl::SetAudioInputMuted()) as well as incoming audio from remote chat control (PartyLocalChatControl::SetIncomingAudioInputMuted()). The states of these mutes can be accessed through their respective getters and are also reflected through the chat indicators returned by PartyLocalChatControl::GetChatIndicator() and PartyLocalChatControl::GetLocalChatIndicator().

Mutes are particularly useful to give some form of temporary control to the player without having to change any of the chat permissions you might have set at the beginning of the gaming session.

How to configure popular scenarios

Push-to-talk

Push-to-talk should be implemented using local muting. Call PartyLocalChatControl::SetAudioInputMuted(false) to allow speech and PartyLocalChatControl::SetAudioInputMuted(true) to restrict it.

Teams

Suppose that we have 4 users, A, B, C, and D, each on their own separate device. User A and User B are on team Blue, and User C and User D are on team Red.

On User A's device:

// Enable all communication with teammate B
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlB, PartyChatPermissionOptions::SendAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveText);

// Disable all communication with opponents
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlC, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlD, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);

Broadcast

Suppose that User A is the leader giving orders and User B, C, and D can only listen.

On User A's device:

localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlB, PartyChatPermissionOptions::SendAudio);
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlC, PartyChatPermissionOptions::SendAudio);
localChatControlA->SetPermissions(chatControlD, PartyChatPermissionOptions::SendAudio);

On User B's device:

localChatControlB->SetPermissions(chatControlA, PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveText);
localChatControlB->SetPermissions(chatControlC, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);
localChatControlB->SetPermissions(chatControlD, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);

On User C's device:

localChatControlC->SetPermissions(chatControlA, PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveText);
localChatControlC->SetPermissions(chatControlB, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);
localChatControlC->SetPermissions(chatControlD, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);

On User D's device:

localChatControlD->SetPermissions(chatControlA, PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveAudio | PartyChatPermissionOptions::ReceiveText);
localChatControlD->SetPermissions(chatControlB, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);
localChatControlD->SetPermissions(chatControlC, PartyChatPermissionOptions::None);