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Announcements

Overview

The Beamable SDK Announcement feature allows players view and receive game-wide announcements configured by the Game-Makers. A few of the main use cases are:

  • Communicating to Players information about the game's live operations that are relevant.
  • Targeting a Subset of Players with gifts or compensations due to things that happen over the course of your live-game services.

Announcements can be created via the portal.

Once created, announcements stay live during the specified date-times. While live, each player has a "view" of that announcement. This view defines whether the player has seen that announcement or claimed any gifts contained in them.

These are exposed in the UAnnouncementView object which can be accessed by the UBeamAnnouncementsSubsystem::GetAnnouncements method.

Claiming an Announcement's Gifts and Marking as Read

It is common to attach gifts to announcements so that players can claim them. To do so, you can use the ClaimAnnouncementsOperation passing in the list of announcement ids (UAnnouncementView::Id).

The image below shows how this can be done in blueprint.

announcements-claiming.png

Marking announcements as read can be achieved in a similar way but with the MarkAnnouncementsReadOperation. The image below shows how you would mark an announcement as read when a user clicks one and a popup opens displaying its details.

announcements-mark-read.png

Usage Guidelines

Aside from the Id most other FString fields in the announcement can be used to store whatever data you need. Common practices include:

  • Passing in TSoftObjectPath strings to reference in-game assets.
  • Passing in some custom string format such that your UI interprets it and change its behavior accordingly.
  • Use ClientDataList to pass in key-value pairs of arbitrary string data based on your game's context.
  • So on...

Our system itself and the SDK doesn't really care about the format or content of the Title, Summary or Body fields so feel free to use them as needed (they are merely semantic suggestions of what an announcement contains).