Discord

Making a game? Need a whole bunch of fancy APIs to help make it great and your players' lives a breeze? Look no further! The Discord GameSDK is an easy drop-in SDK to help you manage all the hard things that come with making a game. Well, all the hards things about coding it at least. Interpersonal communication skills are on you (have you heard of this cool chat app called Discord?).

OK, cool, so how's it work?

At a high level, the Discord GameSDK has a class, Discord. This class is in charge of the creation of a few "manager" sub-classes. They are:

• AchievementManager - for achievements!
• ActivityManager - for Rich Presence and game invites
• ApplicationManager - for retrieving a user's OAuth2 bearer token, locale, and current game branch
• ImageManager - for getting data about images on Discord, like user avatars or chat images
• LobbyManager - for multiplayer lobbies
• NetworkManager - for all your networking layer needs
• OverlayManager - for interacting with Discord's built-in overlay
• RelationshipManager - for users' social relationships across Discord, including friends list
• StorageManager - for saving game data to the disk and the cloud
• StoreManager - for all things entitlements and SKUs, including IAP functionality
• UserManager - for fetching user data for a given id and the current user
• VoiceManager - to make use of Discord's awesome voice chat

Each one of these managers contain a number of methods and events used to interact with Discord in the context of the manager. For example, RelationshipManager has a function called Filter(), which lets you pare down a user's inter-Discord relationships based on a boolean condition, like being friends!

Most functions in the Discord GameSDK, uh, function in a similar way. They take whatever parameters are required for the function to do its job—a user id, the requested size for an image, etc.—and a callback by means of a function pointer. That callback is fired when the function completes its work, letting you handle events without worrying about piping asynchronously-returned data to the right context.

Some functions behave with a normal return behavior; e.g. RelationshipManager.Count() just returns the number directly. Don't worry, it's outlined in the docs.

A quick example with our C# binding:

c#
var userManager = discord.GetUserManager();

// Return via callback
userManager.GetUser(290926444748734465, (Discord.Result result, ref Discord.User otherUser) =>
{
  if (result == Discord.Result.Ok)
  {
    Console.WriteLine(otherUser.Username);
    Console.WriteLine(otherUser.Id);
  }
});


// Return normally
userManager.OnCurrentUserUpdate += () =>
{
    var currentUser = userManager.GetCurrentUser();
        Console.WriteLine(currentUser.Username);
        Console.WriteLine(currentUser.Discriminator);
        Console.WriteLine(currentUser.Id);
    };
});

Discord passes a number of environment variables down to the SDK. These are accessed by various methods in the SDK and can be changed for local testing by changing the value in your local environment.

Debugging is a pain, so before we get into the meat of the SDK, we want to make sure you're prepared for when things go awry. Within the Discord core is a function called SetLogHook(). It takes a level, which is minimum level of log message you want to listen to, and a callback function:

cs
public void LogProblemsFunction(Discord.LogLevel level, string message)
{
  Console.WriteLine("Discord:{0} - {1}", level, message);
}

discord.SetLogHook(Discord.LogLevel.Debug, LogProblemsFunction);

You should begin your integration by setting up this callback to help you debug. Helpfully, if you put a breakpoint inside the callback function you register here, you'll be able to see the stack trace for errors you run into (as long as they fail synchronously). Take the guess work out of debugging, or hey, ignore any and all logging by setting a callback that does nothing. We're not here to judge.

Creates an instance of Discord to initialize the SDK. This is the overlord of all things Discord. We like to call her Nelly.

Returns a new Discord.

// c++ land
discord::Core* core{};
discord::Core::Create(53908232506183680, DiscordCreateFlags_Default, &core);

// c# land
var discord = new Discord(53908232506183680, (UInt64)Discord.CreateFlags.Default);

Destroys the instance. Wave goodbye, Nelly! You monster. In C# land, this is Dispose().

Returns void.

None

cs
discord.Dispose();

Registers a logging callback function with the minimum level of message to receive. The callback function should have a signature of:

MyCallbackFunction(LogLevel level, string message);

Returns void.

cs
public void LogProblemsFunction(Discord.LogLevel level, string message)
{
  Console.WriteLine("Discord:{0} - {1}", level, message);
}

discord.SetLogHook(Discord.LogLevel.Debug, LogProblemFunctions);

Runs all pending SDK callbacks. Put this in your game's main event loop, like Update() in Unity. That way, the first thing your game does is check for any new info from Discord.

This function also serves as a way to know that the local Discord client is still connected. If the user closes Discord while playing your game, RunCallbacks() will return/throw Discord.Result.NotRunning.

In C and C++, this function returns Discord.Result. In C#, it returns void and will throw Discord.Result error if something went wrong.

None

cs
void Update()
{
  discord.RunCallbacks();
}

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with activities in the SDK.

Returns an ActivityManager.

None

cs
var activityManager = discord.GetActivityManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with relationships in the SDK.

Returns a RelationshipManager.

None

cs
var relationshipManager = discord.GetRelationshipManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with images in the SDK.

Returns an ImageManager.

None

cs
var imageManager = discord.GetImageManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with users in the SDK.

Returns an UserManager.

None

cs
var userManager = discord.GetUserManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with lobbies in the SDK.

Returns a LobbyManager.

None

cs
var lobbyManager = discord.GetLobbyManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with networking in the SDK.

Returns an NetworkManager.

None

cs
var networkManager = discord.GetNetworkManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with the overlay in the SDK.

Returns an OverlayManager.

None

cs
var overlayManager = discord.GetOverlayManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with applications in the SDK.

Returns an ApplicationManager.

None

cs
var applicationManager = discord.GetApplicationManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with storage in the SDK.

Returns a StorageManager.

None

cs
var storageManager = discord.GetStorageManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with SKUs and Entitlements in the SDK.

Returns a StoreManager.

None

cs
var storeManager = discord.GetStoreManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with voice chat in the SDK.

Returns a VoiceManager.

None

cs
var voiceManager = discord.GetVoiceManager();

Fetches an instance of the manager for interfacing with achievements in the SDK.

Returns an AchievementManager.

None

cs
var achievementManager = discord.GetAchievementManager();