Concepts

This page explains the core building blocks that nohub uses to manage lobbies. This knowledge is useful when designing and implementing features around nohub.

Games

A Game is an application or software release that uses nohub to manage Lobbies.

By default, nohub does not track multiple games, and assumes each lobby belongs to the same game.

However, nohub can be configured to manage lobbies for multiple games. In this case, nohub will also keep a list of games that it manages.

ID

Each game has an ID. It is an arbitrary string, unique to it.

Name

Games may also have a name. This is data is kept to make it easier to understand what’s going on in nohub.

Sessions

Whenever a client connects to nohub, a session is created for them. This session is active as long as the connection is live, and is destroyed once the connection is terminated.

Sessions may be associated to Games.

Lobbies

A lobby is a hosted game that the player can join. In other software, they are also called rooms.

A lobby belongs to the session that created it. The lobby can only be managed by its owner session. Once the session ends, the lobby is automatically destroyed.

ID

Each lobby has an ID. This is an arbitrary string, unique to the lobby.

Address

This is the address where players need to connect when they want to join the lobby. This can be anything, as long the game itself can parse and use it. It is good practice to make it a URI.

For example:

enet://221.230.23.3:32735

noray://foxssake.studio/sC2pnRfnBUhP

Custom data

Since nohub is game-agnostic, it does not know the specifics about the game it’s supporting. Still, games often want to display data for each lobby, like the name of the lobby, number of current players in the game, maximum number of players, etc.

To achieve this, you can attach custom data to your lobbies. Custom data is a key-value dictionary, that can store arbitrary data.

For example:

{
  "name": "Dave's Lobby",
  "player-count": "6",
  "player-capacity": "8"
}

Note that both keys and values are stored as strings.

Hidden lobbies

Lobbies may be hidden. The lobby will not appear when listing lobbies. Players can still join the lobby, if they have the lobby’s ID.

Locked lobbies

Lobbies may be locked. Locked lobbies are still visible, but player’s can’t join them.