The coherence package comes with several samples you can choose to add to your project. Each provides Prefabs and scripts that you can add to your Scene and edit however you want.
There are currently 3 samples available: a Room connection dialog, a World connection dialog, and a Lobby connection dialog.
The difference between Rooms and Worlds is explained on this page: Rooms and Worlds, while Lobbies have somewhat of a different role in that they are usually used in addition to Rooms in a game flow.
Each sample comes with a Prefab that can be added to your Scene. You can add them via coherence > Explore Samples.
Effectively these do two things for you :
Import the sample in the Samples directory of your project, if it isn't already.
Add the Prefab from the sample to your Scene.
Int the example above, that would be Room Connection Dialog.prefab.
The Rooms Connect Dialog has a few helpful components that are explained below.
At the top of the dialog we have an input field for the player's name.
Next is a toggle between Cloud and Local. You can switch to Local if you want to connect to a Rooms Server that is running on your computer.
Next is a dropdown for region selection. This dropdown is populated when regions are fetched from the coherence cloud. The default selection is the first available region. This is not enabled when you switch from Cloud to Local. This is also only relevant if you deploy your game to several different regions.
Next is a dropdown of available Rooms in the selected region (or in your local server if using the Local mode).
After selecting a Room from the list the Join button can be used to join that Room.
If you know someone has created a room but you don't see it, you can manually refresh the rooms list using the Refresh button.
The Create a room section adds a Room to the selected region.
This section contains controls for setting a Room's name and maximum player capacity. Pressing the Create button will create a Room with the specified parameters and immediately add it to the Room Dropdown above. Create and Join will create the Room, and also join it immediately.
The Worlds Connect Dialog is much simpler. It simply holds a dropdown for region selection, an input field for the players name, and a Connect button.
If you start a local World server, it will appear as LocalWorld.
Samples are copied to your assets folder, this means you can change and customize the scripts and Prefabs however you like.
Future versions of coherence won't override your changes. If you upgrade to a newer version of coherence and import a new sample, they will be imported in a separate folder named after the coherence version.
If you want the new sample to overwrite the old one, first rename the folder in which the samples are, then import the new version.
If you notice that the samples are non-responsive to input, make sure you have an EventSystem component in the scene.
The folder to rename is the one that is named after the version number (normally its path would be something like Samples/coherence/1.1.0/ for coherence 1.1.0).
It's quick and easy to set up a networked scene from scratch using the coherence SDK.
The topics of this page are covered in the first minute of this video:
Preparing a scene for network synchronization requires to add three fundamental objects:
coherence > Scene Setup > Create CoherenceBridge
This object manages the connection with coherence's relay, the Replication Server, and is the centre of many connection-related events.
coherence > Scene Setup > Create LiveQuery
Creates a LiveQuery, which allows to define what are of the world the application is interested in when requesting data from the Replication Server. You can surround your entire scene in one query or can attach it to an object such as the player or a camera.
You don't have to define a range for the LiveQuery. Leaving the range to 0 means that the range is infinite, so nothing is filtered out.
coherence > Explore Samples
A Connect dialog UI provides an interface to the player to connect to the Replication Server, once the game is played. You can create your own connection dialog, but we provide a few samples as a quick way to get started.
If you're unsure about which dialog to add, choose Rooms for now. You can read more about Rooms and Worlds.
If you're unsure about which dialog to add, choose Rooms for now. You can read more about Rooms and Worlds.
The connection dialog samples we provide are here for you to completely customize, you can read more in the section dedicated to Samples.
Using the coherence Hub window gives you an overview of everything related to networking in your project. The Overview tab will show you the current status and which actions you need to perform for everything to work.
To open it, go to coherence > coherence Hub
