Regions
Normcore automatically selects the optimal region for the first client that connects to a room by measuring latency to datacenters on our network. However, some applications may want to override this behavior to let users select a region or to select an ideal region for a group of players.
Available Regions
Normcore provides a set of high-level regions designed to make sense when displayed to users. Each region is backed by multiple datacenters across multiple cloud providers for redundancy.
| Region | Display Name | Datacenters |
|---|---|---|
us-east | US East | New York, NY Ashburn, VA |
us-central | US Central | Chicago, IL Dallas, TX |
us-west | US West | San Francisco, CA Los Angeles, CA |
europe-west | Europe | Amsterdam, Netherlands Frankfurt, Germany |
me-central | Middle East | Dubai, UAE |
asia-southeast | Asia Southeast | Jurong West, Singapore |
asia-east | Asia East | Osaka, Japan |
oceania | Oceania | Sydney, Australia |
africa-south | South Africa | Johannesburg, South Africa |
southamerica-east | South America | São Paulo, Brazil |
asia-south | India | Mumbai, India |
Requesting available regions
Use Realtime.GetRegionsListAsync() to fetch a list of available server regions along with latency measurements:
using UnityEngine;
using Normal.Realtime;
public class RegionsExample : MonoBehaviour {
[SerializeField] private Realtime _realtime;
private async void Start() {
// Send the GetRegionsList request and measure ping to each region.
var response = await _realtime.GetRegionsListAsync();
// Normcore will provide the local client's public IP and GeoIP location for matchmaking.
var client = response.client;
Debug.Log($"Client: {client.address} ({client.location})");
// Normcore will ping each region and sort by lowest latency first
foreach (var region in response.regions) {
Debug.Log($"{region.displayName}: {region.ping}ms {region.address} ({region.location})");
}
}
}
The response structure looks like this:
GetRegionsListResponse {
ClientMetadata client {
string address // Client's public IP address
Location location { // Client's approximate location
float latitude
float longitude
}
}
RegionMetadata[] regions { // Sorted by ping, lowest first
string name // Region identifier (e.g., "us-east")
string displayName // User-friendly name (e.g., "US East")
string address // IP address for pinging
Location location { // Datacenter coordinates
float latitude
float longitude
}
float? ping // Latency in ms, or null if unavailable
}
}
Requesting a preferred region
When connecting to a room, you can specify a list of preferred regions in order of priority. Normcore will attempt to spin up the room server in each region until one succeeds. If none of the preferred regions are available, Normcore falls back to the default behavior where the client pings a set of available datacenters and selects the lowest-latency location.
using UnityEngine;
using Normal.Realtime;
public class RegionsExample : MonoBehaviour {
[SerializeField] private Realtime _realtime;
private async void Start() {
// Send the GetRegionsList request and measure ping to each region.
var response = await _realtime.GetRegionsListAsync();
// Normcore will provide the local client's public IP and GeoIP location for matchmaking.
var client = response.client;
Debug.Log($"Client: {client.address} ({client.location})");
// Normcore will ping each region and sort by lowest latency first
foreach (var region in response.regions) {
Debug.Log($"{region.displayName}: {region.ping}ms {region.address} ({region.location})");
}
// Here you can combine data with other clients to sort your preferred regions list
// Next we can connect to a room server and pass our list of preferred regions
var preferredRegions = response.regions;
_realtime.Connect("Test Room", new Room.ConnectOptions {
preferredRegions = preferredRegions,
});
}
}
Picking the ideal region
To pick the lowest latency region for all clients, have each client send the name and ping of each region to your matchmaking server, then compute the total latency for each region and sort accordingly:
var playerRegionPings = new[] {
new[] { (name: "us-east", ping: 10f), (name: "us-west", ping: 71f), (name: "europe-west", ping: 105f), ... },
new[] { (name: "us-east", ping: 32f), (name: "us-west", ping: 31f), (name: "europe-west", ping: 121f), ... },
new[] { (name: "us-east", ping: 27f), (name: "us-west", ping: 76f), (name: "europe-west", ping: 132f), ... },
new[] { (name: "us-east", ping: 14f), (name: "us-west", ping: null), (name: "europe-west", ping: 100f), ... },
};
// Add up total ping time per region and sort by lowest total
var sortedRegions = playerRegionPings
.SelectMany(p => p) // Flatten into a single list of all ping results
.GroupBy(r => r.name) // Group by region name
.OrderBy(g => g.Sum(r => r.ping ?? float.MaxValue)) // Sort by total ping (null = unreachable)
.Select(g => g.Key) // Extract region names
.ToArray(); // Convert to an array of region names, sorted by lowest latency.
We recommend providing Normcore with a list of preferred regions in case your first pick is unavailable.
Unity WebGL does not support pinging regions. We recommend using the provided GeoIP location of each client and region to measure physical distance as a fallback when ping is unavailable.
Reading the region of the connected room
To check which region you're connected to, use the region field:
using UnityEngine;
using Normal.Realtime;
public class RegionsExample : MonoBehaviour {
[SerializeField] private Realtime _realtime;
private async void Start() {
_realtime.didConnectToRoom += (realtime) => {
var region = realtime.room.region;
Debug.Log($"Connected to {region?.displayName}");
};
}
}
Normcore may occasionally spin up a room in a different region than your first choice. This typically happens due to capacity constraints in that region or factors like an active internet backbone outage affecting performance.
This can be useful for server browsers. Clients can report the address of the region they're connected to, allowing other clients to ping the region and display latency for each room in the list.