I want to allow players to change their avatars’ clothes, equipment, or hairstyles. How I can implement the feature?

strix-support

strix-support

If you have implemented a local changer of clothes, equipment, or hairstyles already, the following is how you can synchronize the changes in the online multiplayer. The following description uses the hairstyle as an example, but you can use the same technique to other elements.

Firstly, assign IDs (a number or a string) in advance to hairstyles that players can choose from. Then, you can synchronize the hairstyle ID to replicas using one of the following techniques. Unless you have some special requirements, it is recommended to use the room member properties, which is easiest to handle.

RPC
Room Member Properties
Variable Synchronization

See below for details.

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1. RPC technique

Define a method to change a hirstyle, e.g., SetHairstyle(int hairstyleId). When a player instructs to change their avatar’s hairstyle, use an RPC to call the replica’s method to change the hairstyle like RpcToAll(nameof(SetHairstyle), hairstyleId).

This technique is easy to understand, but the RPC takes effect only on the replicas on clients that are in a room at the moment, so you need to implement some other way to tell a client that is joining later the currently active hairstyle. For that purpose, you can send an RPC from within a handler of the room event RoomJoinNotified, or you can let the newly joined room meber send an RPC that “requests a notice of a hairstyle”, but anyway their implementation tends to be tangling. It is a disadvantage of this technique.

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2. Room Member Properties technique

STRIX provides room member properties for each room member; one of which is the property of name properties that allows you to define application-specific custom properties. Each room member can update their own custom property any time, and the change is automatically synchronized to other clients.

On the replica side, you can retrieve a Dictionary containing custom properties by strixReplicator.roomMember.GetProperties() to refer to the custom property value that represents the hairstyle ID among them. Set the initial hairstyle upon instantiation in the Start callback. When a room member property is updated, RoomSetMemberNotified room event fires, so you can use its event handler to change the hairstyle of the avatar.

The values of room member properties are synchronized to those room members that joined in a middle of a game play, so you don’t need to take care of those players who joined later specially.

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3. Variable Synchronization technique

In the avatar’s script, define a variable (an instance field of the class) that represents a hairstyle, and give it the [StrixSyncField] attribute. Then, the value of the variable is automatically synchronized to replicas.

In this technique, mid-gameplay joiners are handled by STRIX automatically, but the change of the value needs to be detected by your script. You need to write a script that remembers the previous hairstyle ID in a separate (non-sync) variable and compares the synchronized variable for the hairstyle and the previous hairstyle ID in the Update callback, for example.