Highlights

• Rewritten connection management and the reference integration to game code. It provides an automatic way to handle common connection errors and provides a clean interface for the cases that require player feedback (for example permanent connection drops).
• New types OrderedDictionary<TKey, TValue> and OrderedSet<TKey> have been added. These are intended as replacements for SortedDictionary<> and SortedSet<> in most use cases. The ordered collections iterate their members in the order they were inserted in, which makes them usable in share game logic code. The ordered collections are usually 3-5x faster and consume about 10% of the memory of their sorted equivalents.
• Major performance and robustness improvements. The overall performance of Metaplay has been improved by roughly 2x and various issues have been fixed which caused instability in larger clusters. Metaplay has now been load tested to 60 000 concurrent bots.

Breaking Changes & Migration

• MetaplayClient is a new class that absorbed a lot of the scaffolding code to manage and update the Metaplay client SDK. This is part of our ongoing work to make the Metaplay SDK easier to use from your game code.
  • Migrating to MetaplayClient is optional. We will continue to develop it further as the "happy path" of integrating the Metaplay SDK into your game.
• ConnectionManager has been replaced with MetaConnection and related classes that provide a cleaner interface and more discrete connection error handling. For a good overview on how to adopt the new connection manager, have a look at Connection Management in our dev guide.
  • We recommend migrating to MetaConnection. It should make your life easier when dealing with connection edge cases.
• Better implementation of type-safe StringId class. The new implementation has better performance and well-defined handling of empty values. An empty value is now always represented by the StringId reference itself being null — the StringId cannot contain a null nor an empty string. The old ShortStringId has been removed due to being superseded by the new StringId.
  • We recommend migrating to the new StringIds where possible.
• Infra: Changed infra-modules to utilize Kubernetes and Helm Terraform providers to improve the robustness of the code in favor of older null_resource based resource creation.
  • Older infrastructure versions (pre-v0.0.8) will need to remove services and deployments prior to updating to v0.0.8 or later.

Change Log

Added

• SDK: Utility methods to RandomPCG: Choice(IList<T>), GetWeightedIndex(IEnumerable<int>), GetWeightedIndex(IEnumerable<F32>)
• SDK: Added OrderedDictionary and OrderedSet. They provide consistent iteration order without the cost of SortedDictionary/SortedSet.
• SDK: Check that MetaMessages don’t transitively include data that is not allowed (raw Actions, IGameConfigData references)
• SDK: Include diagnostics tools in docker container: dotnet-counters, dotnet-trace, dotnet-dump, dotnet-gcdump
• SDK: Added support for structured logging and optional json output format
• SDK: New connection management and health checks. Optional automatic reconnects.
• Reference project: Added a loading screen
• Reference project: Added a debug menu (tap the Metaplay logo)
• Reference project: Added a dedicated error popup with fields for some useful debug info
• Reference project: Added an app start scene for a cleaner example on initialization
• Reference project: Implemented connection error handling (reconnecting on error, connection error popup)

Changed

• SDK: Access Google Sheets using service account credentials
• SDK: Upgrade to Akka 1.4.2, MySqlConnector 0.62.0, prometheus-net 3.5.0
• SDK: Better implementation of StringId by interning and reference comparisons, remove obsolete ShortStringId
• SDK: Moved connection management to Metaplay namespace
• SDK: Refactored connection management for easier usage and more robust error handling
• SDK: Optimize memory allocations from PrettyPrint
• SDK: Better IOReader error handling: throw IODecodingError if reading past buffer
• SDK: Optimize memory allocations from IOReader
• Reference project: Replace all uses of ShortStringId with StringId
• Reference project: New UI style
• Reference project: New StateManager class with support for discrete app start and loading states
• Reference project: New MetaplayClient class that will develop into a clean interface for controlling Metaplay going forward

Fixed

• Reference project: Fixed admin mails not giving out gold