Highlights

• Support for advanced authentication and authorization. You can use it to control access to your LiveOps Dashboard with user accounts, roles, and permissions. Read more at Dashboard User Authentication.

• Experimental support for backward-compatible game updates is now available.
  • The new backward compatibility feature enables multiple client versions to work with the same server. This allows new builds to be submitted to App Store without requiring all the clients to immediately update, which may not be immediately available due to App Store propagation delays, which can take multiple hours.
  • The feature is built on the concept of Logic Version, which represents the version of the game's behavior. A single Logic Version is active at any given time, to ensure a single consistent view of the world on the server, but the client and server can support a range of Logic Versions to enable versions migrations with minimal downtime.
  • This feature is still experimental and may have issues. Some changes are still expected as the feature matures. The feature also doesn't yet have proper documentation. Please contact us if you want to start using the feature.
• Performance and scaling related improvements
  • Improved error handling when server joins into a cluster.
  • If actions are submitted too frequently, the actions are executed on the server but the checksum validations can get throttled and run in delayed batches.
  • Memory allocation rate has been reduced.
  • The client-side checksumming frequency can be lowered, which improves performance but reduces the quality of desync reports. This makes large-scale BotClient tests more efficient.
  • Socket and CLR configurations have been tweaked on the server.
• Grafana has now been expanded to collect and display a broader range of infra metrics. New aws_ prefixed Prometheus metrics are now available to cover AWS native resources like EC2 virtual machines, ELB load balancers, RDS databases, VPC networking, and similar. Combined with the already existing metrics from Kubernetes pods, you now have a full cross section of metrics across your stack!
• Debug actions: [DevelopmentOnlyAction] attribute for marking ModelActions as development-only.

Breaking Changes & Migration

• A new [DevelopmentOnlyAction] attribute has been added for marking ModelActions as development-only.
  • It is recommended to add this attribute to all of your actions that are supposed to be disabled on production servers.
• To adopt the Auth0 authorization in your deployments you need to create and Auth0 account and add the configurations to your infrastructure. Just ask us and we'll help! More information here: Dashboard User Authentication.
  • You don't need to adopt authorization until you have a live game and need a more secure LiveOps environment.
• Supporting the new Logic Version requires passing in the version to all the (de)serialization calls in order to support serialization between different versions. The attributes [AddedInVersion(<logicVersion>)] and [RemovedInVersion(<logicVersion>)] have been added, which are used to ensure checksum comparisons can work across differing Logic Versions.

Change Log

Added

• Dashboard: Added copying and overwriting of player states.
• SDK: Allow reducing client checksumming frequency. Improves performance but loses ability to identify the root cause of a checksum mismatch error.
• SDK: Support for backward-compatible game updates via supporting multiple LogicVersions. This is a breaking change to the wire protocol.
• SDK: PlayerActionDevelopmentOnlyAttribute to use for Actions that should only work in development builds.
• SDK: Support serialization of Nullable<T> where T is a struct.
• SDK: Added PlayerTimeZoneInfo and MessageLoginRequest.TimeZoneInfo to get information about client's time zone.
• Dashboard: Added Auth0 integration and a user page to show the current auth0 identity.
• Dashboard: Added user permission requirements to all actions.
• Dashboard: Developer mode toggle now persist in browser's local storage.
• Dashboard: Added current commit id to the sidebar in development mode.
• HTTP API server now optionally performs authentication and authorization.
• Reference project: Listeners for IAP claiming and validation failures.

Changed

• Dashboard: Logout and ⚙️ buttons now look more like buttons.
• Dashboard: Updated dependencies.
• Dashboard: Replaced /info with /hello and /gamedata endpoints to facilitate dashboard lazy config loading.
• SDK: Allow reducing client checksumming frequency. Improves performance but loses ability to identify the root cause of a checksum mismatch error.
• SDK: Action flush processing is rate limited. Too frequent flushes are pooled and processed in batches.
• SDK: Listen socket accept queue sizes are increased significantly.
• SDK: Extend metrics collection to cover CLR Thread Pool healthiness, network IO statistics, and Game Entity and TCP socket lifecycle metrics.
• SDK: Rename Util.ComputeMD5() to Util.ComputeMiniMD5() (it only returns the first 32 bits of the hash).
• SDK: Support disallowing bots from connecting to production deployment.

Fixed

• Dashboard: Fixed in-game mail form validation for null values.
• SDK: Authentication hash comparison could have returned true for non-equal values.
• SDK: Fixed deserialization of fields of value types in Unity Editor with .NET 2.0.
• SDK: PlayerModel.CurrentTime no longer drifts over time.
• SDK: Support scientific notation for MaxBotId in BotClient (generated by Helm for large values).

Release 6.1

Changed

• SDK: Moved some localization-related types to Metaplay.Core.Localization.
• SDK: Split SDK-related parts of InAppProductInfo into Metaplay.Core.InAppPurchase.InAppProductInfoBase.