A list of common terms and concepts used in coherence.
Bandwidth is the data that your game servers are using up to sync your Room or World and all the players within it.
Also known as CoherenceBridge. The Bridge is a system that makes sure every GameObject is linked to its networked representation. It essentially interfaces between the GameObject world and the coherence SDK code running "under the hood". When you place a GameObject in your scene, the Bridge detects it and makes sure all the synchronization can be done via the CoherenceSync component.
A CCU hour represents the time that a Room or World is online. The CCU hour consumption per Room or World is determined by the maximum player capacity they are reserved for, regardless of how many players are active within them.
A CoherenceSync representing a Client connected to the Replication Server. Required to send Client Messages.
The process of generating code specific to the game engine that takes care of network synchronization and other network-specific code. This is done using a CLI tool called Protocol Code Generator that takes the Schema file and generates code for various engines (e.g. C# for Unity).
The backend of the coherence Developer Portal.
CoherenceSync is a component that should be attached to every networked GameObject. It may be your player, an NPC or an inanimate object such as a ball, a projectile or a banana. Anything that needs to be synchronized over the network and turned into an Entity.
The coherence software development kit plugin for Unity, allowing your Unity project to make use of coherence for multiplayer.
Allows for sending an instruction to an Entity that may be running on a different machine.'
Dashboard is the front-end of the coherence Developer Portal that is used for managing your coherence projects.
These are useful features for multiplayer games that coherence offers like the Key-value store and Authentication Service (Player Accounts). More info is available in the Game Services and Lobbies articles.
The KV Database, also know as a key-value store, provides a simple persistence layer for the players. The KV Database matches a short key (identifier) to a specific value (data payload) held in a simple, unstructured database. For example, KV store can be used to store the player's score, email address, or any other data. There are no limits to the total number of key/value pairs as long as the total size stays under 256KB.
A common game optimization technique for saving resources spent on rendering or syncing GameObjects not in the immediate vicinity of the player/camera. Commonly, several LODs are applied in a gradual manner so the transitions seem smooth. In coherence, Archetypes let you group Components together and create distinct "levels of detail". Each such level must have a distance threshold, and a list of Components that should be present at that distance.
Multi-Room Simulators are Room Simulators which are able to simulate multiple Game Rooms at the same time.
The business entity that uses coherence for its project(s).
It is a separate application whose only job is to write the persitent objects to the disk. After say a crash the Persistance Client would read the file from the disk and send it to the Replication Server. The save frequency is set to 30 seconds by default.
Either a game project or other project, connected to an Organization.
The Schema is a file that defines which data types in your project are synced over the network. Schema specifies all the relevant data to be communicated to the Replication Server like name, hitpoints, level, speed, etc. It has two primary uses:
A Simulator is a headless client running game logic in the server that is syncing all the changes in the Room or World to all the players. It ensures a stable connection and is a way to make your multiplayer game logic tamper-proof. Find out more about Simulators in our developer documentation.
A string of text that uniquely identifies an uploaded Simulator, making it easy to differentiate between various World or Room Simulators during deployment. The Simulator slug should be descriptive for ease of use purposes, although coherence supports any string value.
Storage here relates to the cost of keeping data on coherence Cloud. It is measured in terabytes (TB) per hour.