Changing scene while joining room and RPC buffer problem

Question

I have a button on my main menu that creates and has the player join a random room. After the client joins this room, I change the scene to the game (main) scene in the OnJoinedRoom method. This works well, until I use the RPC call with buffers.

There are 5 spawn points in the game scene, and every time a player joins the room, they occupy a spawn point, so no-one else can spawn at that point. So, I have list of spawn points in my code, and every time a player joins, it randomly picks a point from that list and "removes" it from the list. It does this via RPC call, so if a player joins the game late, it removes that point, too.

There is a problem with that RPC's buffer because of the "scene change". After OnJoinedRoom, the RPC buffers are called only when the player joins the room, and before the scene change. Because the scene hasn't changed yet, it has trouble finding the buffered photonview, and it throw outs an error. It doesn't update the list.

Can I delay the buffer calls, is there a better way to change my scene while joining a room?

Answer 1

A more reliable and efficient method of syncing new players is delegating this task to another player. Since Photon's servers aren't authoritative, this is the next best option to catch someone up.

One method is to send an RPC to the master client telling it to catch you up on the game state. The master client then sends you a stream of data giving you information about everything you need. This gives you full control over the replication on new player.

Alternatively, you could buffer received buffered RPCs and process them once your scene is loaded. This is probably easier since you won't have to have the master client gather everyone's information but keep in mind that every single buffered RPC will get sent to the new player. This means if you send a buffered RPC every time a door opens/closes, the new player will get all those RPCs even if all but 1 are outdated and useless.