I am working on a game where as soon as a player enters, they will claim a house / plot of land. In front of the plot, there’s a platform that if you stand on it, one of two things happens.
A) If no player owns this plot, a little ScreenGui appears at the top and indicates that you can press a button to claim it.
B) If someone does own the plot, no ScreenGui appears.
This means that the client needs to know whether a plot of land is available for purchase or not. What is the right way to do this? Should stepping on the block trigger a request to the server (via some kind of RemoteEvent?)?
This seems overly complex, as it seems like the client should just know about this, but I’m not sure what the best way to do this is. Do I have the server fire a remote event to Player X’s client as soon as player X joins with a bunch of relevant server state, and then keep it in sync via future RemoteEvents whenever something happens (such as a new player enters the game and claims another house), or something else?
Once the player is ready, you can replicate all the existing plot ownership data to the client. Whenever a change to any plot ownership is made on the server, replicate the change to only the clients who have already received that initial data.
The server should still validate that the client can actually claim the plot when it attempts to, for security reasons and because the client may not yet have processed some new ownership action that the server sent to it, but the client shouldn’t need to ask the server if a plot is available.
Usually the table structure for something like this would be storing two tables, one with keys as some representation of the plot (such as a number or Instance), and the value as the player’s user ID, and another with the keys being player’s user ID, and the value being the same plot identifier. This way, it’s quick and elegant to look up who owns a plot, and also what plot a player owns.
For more complex features you may instead store a table with keys as plot identifiers, and values as tables of plot data that include who owns it.
How does this replication happen? Does this mean just firing a Remote Event at the end of the server’s PlayerAdded handler and passing a table with plot ownership data, or something else?
The server should have a table with all the info needed to render the plot. Invoke a remote function from the client to retrieve the table. Use logic on the client to convert the table into furniture inside a house/etc.
Yes for players just joining. You should also fire that remoteevent when plot ownership changes. And on character added (unless your gui doesn’t reset on spawn).