Multiplayer

How matches happen.

Page	Covers
Lobby, Rooms and Accounts	The lobby screen, accounts and keys, rooms, ranked matches, leaderboard, profile
Connecting	connect / disconnect console, lobby UI flow, joining a match under way, reconnecting, NetGraph
In-Game Chat	T to talk, history dialog, chat in demos
Demos	Server-side recording, demo list, playback (normal + cinematic)

High-Level Flow

The lobby orchestrates matchmaking and spawns dedicated game servers via GameServerSpawner. Players never connect directly to the lobby for gameplay — they connect to the game server the lobby tells them about.

For developer flows, the engine's map <name> [gametype] command bypasses the matchmaker and asks the lobby for a one-off dev-spawn. See the engine's Map Launching Guide (docs/manual/guides/map-launching.md in the engine repo).