Player Ident Process

For Player Identity & Platform-based Authorization, Nodecraft provides a system coined as a Player Ident. Every player in your game uses this Player Ident process when logging in to the platform, which unifies the authentication process, resulting in a consistent Player entity, no matter what platform your game supports.

Detecting Supported Ident Methods

All sessions start with an API call to get the Game Info. This tells you what Ident methods or platforms are actively supported. The Game Client must identify which options are available to it as well. For example, if you have one build for both Steam and Epic Games, your client will be responsible for identifying which option is available to it before attempting an Ident.

Auto Ident

Most Supported Platforms, Identity Platforms such as Steam, Xbox, Epic Games, etc., will provide secure and server-verifiable authentication. Nodecraft Discovery automatically consumes and provides the API calls to fully support these platforms without any user input. This means your Players won't have a Password or require any input to authenticate for these platforms. This process is identified as an Auto Ident. Simple use the Send Token API request to send tokens as generated by the Game Engine SDK for each Platform.

Manual Ident

In the event you're supporting a playerbase that may have limited connectivity to any platform, if you want to support a platformless multiplayer, or most commonly, you want an authentication scheme for testing, use Manual Ident. This process does require user input as they have to verify their identity via a 3rd party. For now, this is only supported by the Manual Ident: email option. The Ident Challenge API request will start the Manual Ident. To complete with ident, with user input, use the same Send Token API request that Auto Ident used. Note: the Send Token request details have different options depending on the Ident Process.

Data Expiration

Player Idents will always assign a Public UUID to each identity for use in the Discovery API. Depending on the Platform and country the player is from the user-identifiable data for username and avatar_url may expire or have a request to be removed. In either of these circumstances, they will be null. Reference the table below for what reasonable defaults are recommended. If you are using the UI from the Nodecraft Game Engine SDK, this is already taken care of for you.

To best understand the Data Expiration by platform, please read Supported Platforms.

Making API Requests

You can find all of the corresponding API documentation for Player Idents in the API Reference.