Welcome to Friends#

The Friends service allows you to boost player engagement by providing players with a social system that works well with other Unity services. With Friends, your players can:

• Send and receive friend requests.
• Build and manage friend lists.
• Block and unblock other players.
• The user sends a message to a friend.

Environments are logical partitions of Unity Game Services that contain data associated with your project. You can set the target environment in the Unity Cloud Dashboard and your initialization scripts.

The Friends API uses JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication. The Authentication SDK supports Anonymous authentication and Platform-specific authentication.

Understanding Friends#

The Friends service manages relationships of different types. In general, most user relationships don’t change often; however, there are updates users often want to know about as soon as possible. To increase efficiency, the Friends SDK fetches all a user’s relationships one time at startup, then keeps the list up-to-date using push notifications.

The SDK sends change notifications as soon as the changes occur. User relationship changes that trigger a push notification include:

• A friend updates their presence status.
• Updates to the presence state for an individual user.
• The user adds a new relationship. A user creates a FRIEND_REQUEST relationship.
• The user removes a relationship, or a FRIEND relationship is otherwise deleted.

The Friends service treats all relationships the same. You can use the various properties of each relationship to decide how to treat that relationship. Each relationship has one or more members (players), each of which might have extra properties that identify that member’s role in the relationship. For example, a FRIEND_REQUEST relationship always has two members:

1. A member with a SOURCE role (the sender).
2. A member with a TARGET role (the receiver).

However, the member's role changes to NONE when a FRIEND_REQUEST relationship changes to a FRIEND relationship.

The SDK provides some wrapper APIs for specific operations to increase the service’s usability.

For example, when you call the SendFriendRequestAsync method, it calls the CreateRelationship API and creates a new FRIEND_REQUEST relationship with the target user.

If there’s already a FRIEND_REQUEST relationship from the target user, it creates a new FRIEND relationship. Depending on the state, SendFriendRequestAsync can result in a FRIEND_REQUEST or a new FRIEND relationship.