Regions

Why use regions?

The greater the distance between a player and a game server, the more likely it is for packet delays to occur. Such delays can make a game unplayable. In extreme cases, players may not be able to connect to the game server at all.

To address this issue, Elympics hosts game servers in multiple regions around the world. Shorter distance from a player to the nearest server reduces latency and makes smooth, lag-free gameplay possible. This way, your game can be accessed from all over the globe.

Note that regions do not solve the problem of players being far away from each other. For a match taking place in a given region, all players within the match should be located close to that region to minimize their lag.

Regions and matchmaking

Keep in mind that players using different regions won't be matched together.

Available regions

Currently, the following regions are available for every game by default:

• warsaw (Poland),
• tokyo (Japan),
• dallas (Texas, USA),
• mumbai (India).

Fallback region in case of providing null, empty string or non-existent / not attached region is warsaw.

Requesting new regions

If you want to host a game in a new region relatively far from the provided ones, please contact us using a form or simply at our Discord.

Usage in practice

To determine the closest region you can use the ElympicsCloudPing.ChooseClosestRegion method. It's recommended to cache the results in a runtime-persistent way so players don't have to wait unnecessarily for the region to be chosen in subsequent matchmaking attempts.

An example of such a caching mechanism is presented below:

public static class ClosestRegionFinder
{
    private static (string Region, float LatencyMs)? CachedClosestRegion;

    // Note that `ElympicsCloudPing.ChooseClosestRegion` is `async` and so it has to be handled with `await` in order to wait for its result.
    // The same goes for every method wrapping this one, as we see below and in the next example.
    public static async UniTask<(string Region, float LatencyMs)> GetClosestRegion()
    {
        if (!CachedClosestRegion.HasValue)
        {
            CachedClosestRegion = await ElympicsCloudPing.ChooseClosestRegion(ElympicsRegions.AllAvailableRegions);
        }

        return CachedClosestRegion.Value;
    }
}

Custom region list

If you want to exclude your game from some regions or have any custom, private region connected, you should provide proper, modified collection of regions instead of ElympicsRegions.AllAvailableRegions. It is recommended to use constants available in ElympicsRegions class to avoid misspellings.

When to search for closest region

It may be tempting to search for the closest region just after the game loads (for example in Awake), but results from such method call will be unreliable because of huge computational overhead when first loading the game.

It's best to call ElympicsCloudPing.ChooseClosestRegion reactively - as a response to player clicking the "Play" button, just before calling ElympicsLobbyClient.Instance.PlayOnlineInRegion (and preferably only if the closest region has not yet been determined).

    [UsedImplicitly]
    public async void PlayOnline()
    {
        var (Region, LatencyMs) = await ClosestRegionFinder.ClosestRegion();
        ElympicsLobbyClient.Instance.PlayOnlineInRegion(Region);

        Debug.Log($"Joined matchmaking in region {Region} with ping {LatencyMs}");
    }

caution

ElympicsLobbyClient.Instance.PlayInClosestRegion method is not recommended as it pings each region every call.