Posts made by Paul Winterhalder

Hi Travis,

I can confirm that indeed there is an API call count for calling a pre/post hook script - we'll look to see if we can make that clearer in the docs.

That said, Ali is very correct, like all scripts, the next 3 API calls are free, and scripts after that are 1/2 count each.

Hope that clarifies things!

Paul.

Hi Travis,

You have a few options:

• Global Entities - simple, basic API - but not very scalable. Definitely make sure you have < 1000 entities.
• Un-owned Custom Entities - more scalable, custom indexes, etc. Requires plus plan
• Global Properties - store simple strings and smaller JSON objects

Those would be the main options. And yes - accessing them uses API calls - but remember, you get 3 free API calls in a script - and every call from then on is just 1/2 a count.

So if you have a script that makes say 5 API calls - it will actually only cost you 2 API counts: 1 to call the script, 3 are free, and the remaining 2 calls are 1/2 each.

Hope that helps!

Paul.

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...)

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.

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.

Hi @Ali-Raza ,

They were added in brainCloud 4.4:

• SysUpdatePropertyJson() - https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/?objective_c#capi-globalapp-sysupdatepropertyjson
• SysUpdatePropertyString() - https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/?objective_c#capi-globalapp-sysupdatepropertystring

Hope that helps!

Paul.

Hi @Ali-Raza ,

Actually I have good news - we added that API to 4.4!

These two methods are available to you now:

• SysUpdatePropertyJson() - http://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/#capi-globalapp-sysupdatepropertyjson
• SysUpdatePropertyString() - http://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/#capi-globalapp-sysupdatepropertyjson

I guess we should have publicized their addition more!

Hope that helps!

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 @Alexandru ,

We've just officially added the Segment call you're looking for to brainCloud 4.55 - which is targeted for release in the next ~30 days...

Updated Roadmap here - https://portal.productboard.com/braincloud/1-braincloud-baas-roadmap

Paul.

Hi Bigzer,

We aren't aware of any issues running our javascript client lib under Edge - and haven't been able to repro your issue.

I'm not a javascript guy - but I'm noticing other warnings / errors there - do those also happen in Chrome?

Paul.

Ah - indeed @Carson-Herrick , you are correct.

Turns out "bchosting" is the name of the group we use in our repo example. braincloudhost is indeed the correct user name.

Apologies for the confusion!

Paul.

Hi @Carson-Herrick ,

You set the permissions in Dockerhub - it's the repository we will retrieve your custom image from.

In summary, you need to do the following in Dockerhub:

1. Create a team, called "brainCloud" probably, that you are going to use to give us access.
2. Invite our user, braincloudhost to your repo, and place us on that brainCloud Team. (Note - this user still has no permissions in your repo)
3. Go to the image that you want to share, then the permissions tab, and give the "brainCloud" team read-only access to that image.

If you do this properly, our braincloudhost user will have read-only access to that image, and nothing else.

I hope that helps!

Paul.

Edit - fixed step 2 with the correct user name, braincloudhost... (I had mistakenly said "bchosting")

Hi Chris,

User entities are primarily indexed by profileId + entityType - so the singleton API will scale well no matter how many players you have.

That said, if your use case gets more complicated, with say hundreds of entities of a particular type per user (say maybe you are modelling user created towns, that sort of thing) - you could consider using Owned Custom Entities instead. You can define addition, custom indexes for those... keeps those lookups fast and efficient.

In addition, if you end up having >1000 Global Entities, you should definitely look at switching to Unowned Custom Entities. Same deal - you can define your own custom indexes...

Hope that helps!

Paul.

Hi Claudiu,

Segments are updated nightly, and also when a user logs in (so that they are fresh).

They are primarily used in determining sales promotions and segmenting push notifications right now.

Currently, there isn't an API to return the current list of segments the user is in - that is something that we definitely plan to address shortly -- it's definitely an omission!

paul.

Hi Chris,

Have you looked into the Singleton API for User Entities?

I would think that that is exactly what you are looking for? http://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/apiref/#capi-entity-getsingleton

Basically the singleton API assumes that there will only be a single entity of a type (say "Level1") per user.

Paul.

Hi Madallin,

Just send a message into our Support Chat bubble and we'll delete the team for you.

Cheers!

Paul.