brainCloud

As a further heads up folks - it is looking like the 4.5.6 server release may get delayed until early next week. This is to allow us to create a proper mechanism for controlling with specific versions of Lobby Services are active at a time... (right now, it is possible for both old and new lobby services to be active during an upgrade transition - and given how much lobby processing has changed in this release - that wouldn't be good).

That said - the rest of 4.5.6 is ready - so we are going to be doing a bit of an incremental roll-out...

• We are starting to release the 4.5.6 Client Libraries today
• We are also making the 4.5.6 Relay Servers available (on our existing 4.5.5 servers) <- this is a simple feature gate for us to enable.

Then, once the 4.5.6 servers (with the new Lobby Servers and a few other fixes) are available, we will release them... that should be either late this week, or more likely early next week).

Anyway, just FYI...

Paul.

Hi folks,

We've got shiny new Relay Servers coming in release 4.5.6. They work better and faster - but unfortunately aren't compatible with our old libs.

Read all the details in our release notes - together with our recommended migration approach:

https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/release-4-5-6/

And note - the old relay servers will continue to work and be available for at least a year. We do highly recommend that you upgrade though!

Paul.
(PS - We're still in final testing, but the release should be this week...)

The authenticate API is not allowed a prehook, every API (including cloud code scripts) only can be called after the user authenticated.

To limit operations like IncrementExperiencePoints() to cloud code only. This will essentially take away the ability to make these calls from the bare client API. You can see a script that enforces these restrictions here - https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/cloud-code-central/handy-cloud-code-scripts/restrictclientcalls-script/

Refer to another post below for more strategies you can apply to prevent cheating: https://forums.getbraincloud.com/topic/23/discussion-strategies-to-prevent-cheating-in-tournaments

Hi folks,

In case you didn't realize it - brainCloud 4.5.5 adds Slack Alerts (beta) to brainCloud - this allows you to connect your app to your Slack instance, and brainCloud will automatically send you alerts across a bunch of categories, including:

• hosting - alerts as servers spin up/down - can be useful for debugging room/relay servers
• purchases - see a notification for each customer purchase! (fun!)
• chat - we post the profane messages (as detected by the configured profanity filter) to create one foul-mouthed channel!
• usage - we output a daily report of you app's api usage
• integration - we let you know if your push notification certificates have expired, or are about to expire - etc...

Note - not all categories are fully populated with messages. We'll be adding more and more over time.

Anyway, give 'er a go and let us know what you think!

Paul.

I copied your scripts to my app, tested, it works without any problem.

So, I guess you see the "getPremadeDeck_Dark_001 is not defined" from the editor warning when you hover over your cursor to the triangle warning icon? Actually, You can just ignore it or comment out the "use strict".

And 4.5.5 is live!

Let us now if you have feedback!

Paul.

Hi folks,

The 4.5.5 release is feature-complete and set to be deployed on Tuesday, July 14th.

Important notes:

• The upgrade will happen between the hours of 8am - noon Eastern Time
• During this time the Design Portal will be disabled. Apologies for the inconvenience!
• All API Services will continue to be available throughout the upgrade
• You can subscribe to service status notifications here - https://braincloud.statuspage.io

A quick summary of 4.5.5 features:

• Amazon In-app Purchases
• Global Files V3 Portal & Deployment Support
• Slack Alerts!
• Custom Entity Singleton API
• Auto-Delete Dormant Users
• Leaderboard Deployment Options
• Custom Entity Deletion Queries
• Product & Promotion Management APIs
• Segment, Currency and Notification Queries
• RTT reliability improvements
• Relay Server client library improvements (especially in the Java libs)
• Improved Room & Relay Server launches
• Misc. fixes and performance enhancements

You will find the full details in the 4.5.5 release notes:
https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/release-4-5-5/

Feedback welcome!

Paul.

Hi Lee,

Apologies for the issue.

As you mention - it appears that the issue was due to a Redis failure - and some fail-over handling in our API Servers that didn't seem to work properly for all servers. This resulted in some RTT errors for some apps.

The issue has since been addressed (by rebooting the failing servers).

We're going to do a post-mortem on the Redis fail-over code to see if we can find the offending code-path - and we've added additional monitoring alerts that will look for just this sort of error in the future so that we can act upon it immediately.

Thanks for reporting it!

Paul.

Hi Chad,

We'll look into it. There are structural complications - in that we keep a separate queue of players waiting to join each type of lobby... so you're looking at in this case changing it to a global (or filterable) queue of waiting players... we'll have to think on that.

I'm assuming that the team and min:max counts for the various lobby types differ? Cause if they don't, you could have a single lobby type - which lobby info that determines the type of game.

Would that be an option for you?

Paul.