Session Actor

The SessionActor is the actor representation of a connected socket to Imlight. It's supervisor is the server itself.

Socket Actions

The SessionActor's primary responsibility is to manage the socket connection it has with it's respective game client. It both receives and sends data to the socket.

When data is received, it is deserialized by the MessageSerializer as a potential magic packet. Once a magic packet is decoded, it is dispatched to a message handler found in any of the message services.

To send data to the socket, one may use the SendToSocket() method found within the SessionActor.

Message Services

The SessionActor has a number of child message service actors. This means that each MessageService is supervised by the SessionActor.

Because SessionActor is unique and dynamic to each connection, every player has a different set of message services and dispatcher. This is what allows Imlight to compute received packets concurrently.

If an exception is thrown from any of the services, the SessionActor will break off and drop the connection it has.

Since the SessionActor is the supervisor for these services, there are methods in-place for one MessageService to speak to another:

• HandleInternalTell() -- Fire-and-forget.
• HandleInternalAsk() -- Awaits a reply with a timeout of 20 seconds.

There is also an AskServer() method, which awaits a reply from the server it is connected to.

TIP

The SessionActor will only dispatch IMessage if it received from the socket.

Gathering Services

When a SessionActor connection is first established, a minimal amount of message services are granted to the session as per the writing in a service factory. This means that each SessionActor has two different sets of services: one before the session handshake is made, and one after.

Each server has its own derived ServiceFactory that dictates both set of services.