Cross-server messaging

Normally, the code within a game can only affect the server or clients that it's running on, but there may be situations where you want different servers to communicate with each other, including:

• Global Announcements — Send announcements such as "A user found a special item!" to all the game's servers.
• Real-Time Server Browser — Compile a list of all the game's servers and who is in them (updated every minute) and display the list on a maximum of 20 servers.

You can support cross-server messaging in your game using MessagingService. You can also use the Teleportation Playground sample game to see how cross‑server messaging works before you implement it. Lastly, see here to explore cross‑server communication using external tools.

Cross-server messaging setup#

To enable cross-server messaging, you must set up a topic which is a customized message channel that's accessible from multiple servers. After you create a topic, you can subscribe users to the topic to receive messages and enable publishing messages to the topic.

Subscribe users to receive messages#

Use MessagingService:SubscribeAsync() to subscribe users to a topic and specify a callback function that detects messages publishing to that topic. For example, the following code sample subscribes all users to a FriendServerEvent topic that receives messages when any user is teleported to a different server.

local MessagingService = game:GetService("MessagingService")
local Players = game:GetService("Players")

local MESSAGING_TOPIC = "FriendServerEvent"

Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
	-- Subscribe to the topic
	local subscribeSuccess, subscribeConnection = pcall(function()
		return MessagingService:SubscribeAsync(MESSAGING_TOPIC, function(message)
			print(message.Data)
		end)
	end)
	if subscribeSuccess then
		-- Unsubscribe from topic upon player ancestry change
		player.AncestryChanged:Connect(function()
			subscribeConnection:Disconnect()
		end)
	end
end)

Publish messages#

Use MessagingService:PublishAsync() to match a specific topic and publish a message to it. For example, the following code sample uses PublishAsync() to notify all users when a user joins a new server, including the Player.Name representing the user's display name and the JobId, a unique identifier for the running game server instance.

local MessagingService = game:GetService("MessagingService")
local Players = game:GetService("Players")

local MESSAGING_TOPIC = "FriendServerEvent"

Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
	-- Publish to topic
	local publishSuccess, publishResult = pcall(function()
		local message = player.Name .. " joined server with 'JobId' of " .. game.JobId
		MessagingService:PublishAsync(MESSAGING_TOPIC, message)
	end)
	if not publishSuccess then
		print(publishResult)
	end
end)