Identifying a player

Aliases

Players within your Talo account can have multiple aliases. For example, a player could have Steam and Epic Games login credentials but both would be tied to them, allowing the player to use either to log in.

You should identify a player after they have authenticated and before you attempt to track any events, add leaderboard entries or do anything related directly to the player.

Identifying

caution

If you are using Talo Player Authentication, you should never have to identify a player manually. Visit the Player authentication docs to learn more about identifying players with authentication enabled.

You can identify a player using Talo.Players.Identify(). The code sample below shows you how you could identify a player using a UI element (this example is also available in the Playground):

IdentifyPlayer.cs

using TaloGameServices;

public class IdentifyPlayer: MonoBehaviour
{
	public string service = 'steam', identifier = '123456';

	public void OnButtonClick()
	{
		Identify();
	}

	private async void Identify()
	{
		try
		{
			await Talo.Players.Identify(service, identifier);
		}
		catch (Exeception err)
		{
			Debug.LogError(err.Message);
		}
	}
}

OnIdentified event

After a successful identification, the Talo.Players.OnIdentified() event will fire, returning the identified player. This allows you to, for example, immediately fetch that player's saves:

Talo.Players.OnIdentified += async (player) =>
{
	await Talo.Saves.GetSaves();
};

Checking identification

Sometimes you might need to check if a player has been identified before. You can use Talo.IdentityCheck() to verify this - it throws an error if a player hasn't been identified yet:

public void DoStuffIfIdentified()
{
	try
	{
	  Talo.IdentityCheck();
	}
	catch (Exception err)
	{
		return;
	}

	// do stuff
}

Merging players

As described above, sometimes a player may have one or more aliases and there are times where you know for certain some aliases belong to the same player. . You can merge players using Talo.Players.Merge() by providing the IDs of both players.

The merge process takes all the props, aliases, and associated data (events, leaderboard entries, saves, etc.) from Player 2 and merge them into Player 1. This means that duplicate props in Player 1 will be replaced by the ones from Player 2.

Steamworks integration

If you have the Steamworks integration enabled, Talo can sync a Steam player using the Steam User Auth API (as described here). You can do this via the Talo.Players.IdentifySteam function. Here's a modified version of an example provided by Unity using Steamworks.NET:

Callback<GetTicketForWebApiResponse_t> m_AuthTicketForWebApiResponseCallback;
string m_SessionTicket;
string identity = "talo";

void SignInWithSteam()
{
	// It's not necessary to add event handlers if they are
	// already hooked up.
	// Callback.Create return value must be assigned to a
	// member variable to prevent the GC from cleaning it up.
	// Create the callback to receive events when the session ticket
	// is ready to use in the web API.
	// See GetAuthSessionTicket document for details.
	m_AuthTicketForWebApiResponseCallback = Callback<GetTicketForWebApiResponse_t>.Create(OnAuthCallback);

	SteamUser.GetAuthTicketForWebApi(identity);
}

void OnAuthCallback(GetTicketForWebApiResponse_t callback)
{
	m_SessionTicket = BitConverter.ToString(callback.m_rgubTicket).Replace("-", string.Empty);
	m_AuthTicketForWebApiResponseCallback.Dispose();
	m_AuthTicketForWebApiResponseCallback = null;

	Talo.Players.IdentifySteam(m_SessionTicket, identity);
}

The identity parameter is optional but strongly recommended as it ensures proper identification of the service verifying the ticket. It can be anything you like but must be the same as the identity passed to Steam when fetching the ticket.