First, it's recommended to use FindOrCreateLobby call instead of CreateLobby. It’s generally a better approach since it handles both cases — creating a new lobby if one doesn’t exist, or joining an existing one if it does. This gives your players a smoother experience when first trying to get into a lobby.

Second, just to clarify the sequence: the STARTING event doesn’t mean the lobby itself is starting, it happens after members have already joined and the server launch conditions are met. At that point, brainCloud is spinning up a game server for the lobby. You can find more details in our lobby documentation here -- https://docs.braincloudservers.com/api/capi/lobby/#lobby-events

Because of this, your loading spinner should remain active continuously after the FindOrCreateLobby call succeeds, since the user’s intent (“joining a lobby”) isn’t complete yet, from the user’s perspective, they’re still “joining a lobby” until they either:

Receive ROOM_READY → success, hide the spinner.

Receive an error → failure, hide the spinner and show an error.

This way, you avoid the hide → show gap, and the spinner matches the full lifecycle of the join process; it simply stays up until the full lobby join flow is resolved.

So in short: use FindOrCreateLobby, and keep the loading spinner up until you get either ROOM_READY or a failure event.

Hi @PJ ,

Your usage of lobbies is exactly why we added the concept of long-lived lobbies. (Admittedly it wasn't part of the original use case - which is probably why some of the documentation doesn't seem to properly reflect that usage <-- we'll review that).

So - needless to say - keep going as you are - and reach out if you hit issues!

Happy coding!

Paul.

Awesome! Still a few things to clean up but I appear to be right back to testing within the editor, but against brainCloud's actual lobby system. The key was setting debug to true in the config.js and following the instructions at the end of the GitHub page. Thanks again!