It's been a while - but we've finally added a proper forum for the brainCloud development community.

We don't do this lightly. Although we're a small team - focused, direct support is important to us - which is why our direct chat forums have been in place since day 1 of brainCloud's launch.

That said, especially in the past six months or so, the call for community forums has become deafening - and as our community of developers is rapidly growing, we're realizing that enabling the community to help support itself (in addition to our crack support team) has its appeal! (We're Canadian, not dumb!)

After a long search, we decided upon NodeBB for our forum software solution. The software is modern, nimble, and fast - with a clean look-and-feel. We were also able to integrate it with our Portal logins - so you don't need two accounts to participate (that was important to us). As a bonus, NodeBB is also built in Canada! (We honestly didn't realize that until just a few days ago!)

Now that we've got our forums in place, we're hoping that you all will visit often and contribute! It's too clean and tidy now - come on in and mess it up!

Feedback welcome!

Cheers!

Paul.

Update - we suspect that this is the same problem:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ios-post-request-with-raw-data.690514/

Hi folks,

We've discovered what looks to be a pretty significant issue with using brainCloud for large packet requests on IOS devices. (edit: removed mention of Android as we have confirmed that it does not occur on Android devices).

The issue appears to be limited to Unity 2019.X.

More info here - https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/warning-unity-2019-x-ios-issues/

We are constructing a minimal test app so that Unity can easily repro this issue (i.e. trying to take brainCloud out-of-the-test loop) - and then we'll submit the defect to Unity directly.

We'll keep you posted.

Paul.

Hi folks,

brainCloud 5.4 is ready for release - and has a ton of new features - including:

• EdgeGap Multiplayer integration
• New Matchmaking Monitor screen (plus matchmaking performance improvements)
• New Server Monitor screen
• New Region, Language and App Store analytics screens
• New APIs for retrieving transactions; IfExists versions of Leaderboard and Event APIs; GetMyDivisions() now returns claimed tournaments in the "Complete" state; etc.

You'll find the full release notes here.

We are on track to deploy the release on Tuesday, Sept 10th.

[We had been planning to deploy Wed Sept 5th - but a late-discovered issue with our updated matchmaking system forced a delay. That said - it's all good now!]

Questions and feedback welcome. We hope you enjoy the release!

Paul.

Hi folks,

Our planned 4.6 release was getting too big - so we're splitting it into 4.55 and 4.6.

The 4.55 release should arrive within the next 30 days.

The big headliner feature is at long last, brainCloud will support Amazon In-app Purchases !

There are also a bunch of useful API additions. Check out the details on our Roadmap.

The bad news is that Cloud Code Folder are still planned for 4.6 - which is going to be a bit longer. That said, we're working hard to get it right!

Cheers,

Paul.

Hi guys,

The plan is to release 4.5 in April.

Cheers!

Paul.

We are pleased to announce the new brainCloud Roadmap! site.

This Roadmap gives a view of:

• what we're currently working on
• what we're planning to add to the platform
• what we're considering adding to the platform

(Note - we won't be necessarily putting everything we're working on here. We still like to surprise!)

Make yourself heard! Vote for the features that are most important to you - and submit suggestions for new features!

In the short-term, go check out the list of goodies that will be included with Release 4.1 next week!

Paul.

Good news?

Looks like Unity is aware of the defect (and working on a fix)...

From discussion here - https://forum.unity.com/threads/ios-post-request-with-raw-data.690514/

Paul.

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.

Hi @PJ ,

Have you seen our RoomServerDevTool? https://github.com/getbraincloud/braincloud-roomserver-devtool

It allows you to setup your local workstation as a remote "Room Server" -- and then you can run and debug the server remotely. Basically brainCloud will attempt to launch a server to your workstation.

Paul.

Hi folks,

We've recently had a new customer ask (via our support lines) for recommended techniques to prevent users for from cheating in tournaments.

Clarification - they are early on in development. They haven't experienced cheating yet; they are thinking ahead and planning their development.

Now of course brainCloud's built-in security helps to alleviate the chances of this. All API calls are encrypted with SSL, and secured using an appId and secret. There are also additional safeguards in the message format and protocol that protect against man-in-the-middle attacks.

That said, security is a many-layered thing (parfait!), and for utmost protection, there are additional steps that app developers can take to protect the integrity of their experiences.

This seems like a good topic for a blog post or knowledge base article - but first I thought I'd put it out to our new community here to gather feedback!

The items that immediately jumped out at us were:

• Limit operations like JoinTournament and especially PostTournamentScore to cloud code only. This is a great first step - essentially takes 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/

• Check for cheating in your cloud code scripts - validate the score before posting from your PostTournamentScore() script. If all scores should be between 10K and 1M - it's a simple matter to reject calls that try to post a score of 5M! We know of tons of customers adding these checks once cheating emerges in their apps. Heck - you can even use pre-hooks (https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/#cc-ccscripts-apihooks) to do so without updating your client!

• Make the parameters to your Post Tournament Score scripts as robust and complete as possible. i.e. if you just provide the "score" to post, you can't it's hard to prevent cheating other than by applying a min or max score test. But if you provide additional information, like level #, # of enemies hit, max multiplier, etc - you may be able to be more sophisticated in rejecting impossible scores.

• Tag Cheaters - you might consider using a user statistic or an attribute (https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/#capi-playerstate-updateattributes) to record whether a player is a cheater. i.e. if they send in one bad score, mark them as a cheater forever (or for a set period of time). You could then pro-actively reject any scores from known cheaters... Adding a "cheater" attribute to players is very common for brainCloud apps... (Spoiler: so much so that we're likely to support the concept directly in the future!)

Anyway, those are the immediate thoughts that pop into mind.

What say your brainCloudians? Agree / disagree? Other ideas?

Paul.

Hi - normally what you'd do there is attach it as a reward to XP level 1. <- XP level 1 has a minimum XP of 0 - so users get it when the user account is created.

I hope that helps!

Hi folks!

brainCloud 5.3 has dropped - and has a bunch of new and updated features.

We certainly hope you like them all!

That said - I'm especially interested in what folks think of:

1. The updated Context Bar at the top of the screen (with more useful Team, App and User info)
2. The new User Menu and User Unlock feature.
3. The new Product Analytics and Product Transactions screens.

Do you like the changes? Are we [hopefully] moving in the right direction? Any feedback on any of the other features?

Here is your chance to help shape the direction of the brainCloud developer experience!

Paul.

Hi,

We've redesigned our script editor again to be more useful for folks with smaller (i.e. laptop) screens.

This is coming to our Public BaaS next week as part of brainCloud 5.2!

We hope you like it.

Paul.

We're glad you like it! brainCloud is good for big and small shops alike - we scale nicely that way

And yes, you can view your entities...

You can view Global Entities by going to Monitoring, then choosing Global Monitoring, and then Global Entities. From there you can search for and view/edit your entities.

As you can see, when viewing an entity there is some metadata, and then the custom contents of the data section of the entity, shown in JSON.

Group Entities are similar - you'll find them under Monitoring | Group Monitoring | Group Entities.

To find User Entities you need to look under a User. So search for your user in the Monitoring | User Monitoring section, and then click on the User Entities page.

Hope that helps!

Paul.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for checking out brainCloud.

As you've ascertained, brainCloud organizes most data into Entities - of which there are multiple types - User Entities (each owned by a user), Global Entities (globally available to all users of a game/app), and Group Entities (owned by groups and accessible by their members).

(Under the covers, brainCloud uses MongoDB - but devs don't access that directly - they do so via our Entity APIs).

You can view and edit this data from various places in the portal:

• Global Entities - via Monitoring | Global Monitoring | Global Entities
• User Entities - via Monitoring | User Monitoring | User Entities
• Group Entities - via Monitoring | Group Monitoring | Group Entities

Sounds like it's primarily Global Entities that you'd want to represent your region data. You can find the APIs for them here. Note - you'll probably want to use a subset of Global Entities called System Entities. Every entity in brainCloud has an owner, and if that owner is deleted the entity is deleted... except System Entities, they don't have owners, and thus survive past the deletion of any specific player.

As for calculating progress on the map every few hours, you'll want to use scheduled cloud code scripts for that. Certainly very doable.

There's a bit more info on our data here: https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/api-modules/data/

Oh - and one more thing, there's a new, more powerful type of entity coming soon called Custom Entities. They're like Global Entities, but support more indexing flexibility and will support much larger collections of entities (into the millions).

Anyway, hope that gets you started!

Cheers,

Paul.

Update: this has now been fixed!

Note - brainCloud will now send over the first part of your email address as the suggested username for the forums. The forums will automatically append a number if there are others with that username.

You can update/customize your username by clicking on your profile in the top-right, and choose Edit Profile.
There you will find a bunch of info you can customize about your user account.

Click Change Username on that screen to change your username itself.

Hope that helps!

Paul.

So, uhhh... it's looking like it is a good time to add Godot support to brainCloud.

Has anyone here used it?

Seeing as we already have very robust C# support - we'll target that first. And it looks like its pretty straight-forward for GDScript to call C# - so that's cool.

We'll also scope our support to Godot 4 and above.

Anything else we should know? If any of you have any insight to provide - feel free to jump in!

Thanks!

Paul.

Okay - we figured it out.

It looks like our new Forum software has an issue with brainCloud user names that contain special characters - including the innocuous comma!

This has to do with how we're matching up the fields from brainCloud's directory and the forum account system.

We should have that sorted out in a few days.

In the meantime, a simple work around is to edit the "Full Name" field of your brainCloud profile...

So - if your name is currently set as "Smith, Jane" just set it to "Jane Smith" and you are good to go!

Apologies for the inconvenience!

Paul.

Hi folks,

In case you didn't realize - all Public BaaS users (i.e. everyone connecting via portal.braincloudservers.com) now has access to our next-generation portal, Portal-X, via portalx.braincloudservers.com.

We are interested in your feedback!

Tell us what you like and don't like. We will be iterating quickly over the coming months - and want to ensure the best experience possible for the launch of brainCloud 5.

Thanks a bunch!

Paul.