Highlights

• New maintenance mode feature. You can use the LiveOps Dashboard to schedule controlled backend downtime. Use maintenance mode to safely tell clients to disconnect from the deployment and prevent new connections.

  

  Documentation for handling maintenance mode in your game client code can be found in Handling Maintenance Mode In Your Game UI

• User-land logging and metrics tooling for game server deployments on shared platform.

• Game server support for structured logs.

• Checksum computations optimized to be about 10x faster on the server.

• Fixed critical bug in persisting objects to database: any byte[] were truncated to 65535 bytes due to MySQL default limit for its BLOB data type. Now, byte[] defaults to LONGBLOB, which supports up to 4GB.

Breaking Changes & Migration

INFO

No actions needed: Migration has been taken care of by Metaplay.

• Fix for the persisting of byte[] requires creating a Entity Framework Core migration step
  • Run dotnet ef migrations add LongBlob in your project's Game.Server directory
• Game.Server's old AWSConfig.json is split into multiple files

  • Split the file into Config.base.json (shared for all deployments) and Config.<env>.json for environment-specific overrides.

  • Ensure that the proper config file(s) are configured in the values.yaml of the project's metaplay-gameserver Helm chart, e.g.:

    config:
        files:
        - "./Config/Config.base.json"
        - "./Config/Config.dev.json"

Change Log

Added

• SDK: Server-side support for writing JSON log files (experimental feature, uses blocking disk writes)
• SDK: Support for compression of large messages (compression disabled by default for now, to avoid breaking backward-compatibility)
• SDK, dashboard & reference project: Maintenance mode
• SDK: Added ability to reconnect players to auth from an older player account through the Dashboard
• Dashboard: Added social auths to player device list

Changed

• SDK: Full protocol hash mismatch is no longer a terminal error
• SDK: Refactor server-side to use two-layer configs: Config/Config.base.json (for common configs) and Config/Config.{env}.json (for env-specific configs)
• SDK: Action and tick checksum computation is 10x faster on dotnet core (server).
• Reference project: Switch back to .NET Standard 2.0 compatibility mode, as serializer no longer requires .NET 4.x
• Dashboard: System page refactored to sub-components for legibility and easier merges in the future

Fixed

• SDK: Serializer is now compatible with Unity .NET 2.0 compatibility in Editor, too (uses reflection-based member accesses when running in Editor)
• SDK: Database-persisted members of type byte[] now default to SQL type 'longblob' to support sizes larger than 64kB (requires migration with manual exclusion of Sqlite)
• SDK: Store Unity Editor-time generated serializer .dll into MetaplayTemp/, so it doesn't get removed whenever Unity is restarted