In celebration of this week’s Ottawa International Games Conference (OIGC), it’s brainCloud Release 2.9!

Nothing too earth-shattering in this release – some minor fixes and changes while we ramp up the development of some larger customer-requested features – coming soon!

 

Release Highlights

• IAP Product Enhancements
  • Categories – Products can now be assigned to categories (i.e. “Gold bundles”, “Elixer bundles”, etc.), which is handy for retrieving lists of similar items for display in store screens.
  • Product Types – brainCloud now allows you to specify whether an IAP product is consumable, non-consumable or subscription (with sub-types for Apple’s free, non-renewing and auto-renewable subscriptions). This additional information allows us to handle the various product types appropriately, in particular fixing our handling of auto-renewable subscriptions.
  • Extra Data – developers are now able to append extra information (key + value pairs) to products
• Unity Client
  • We have significantly overhauled our Unity Client – improving its communications infrastructure, and adopting a new Json processing library (JsonFx).Warning: as part of the Unity Client Refactoring, we have changed the Error callback/delegate signature so that you no longer have to parse the response Json. This change greatly simplifies your error processing, but is not backwards compatible. The older 2.8 libraries still function just fine though.

 

Portal Changes

• Design | Marketplace | Products – added support for categories, product type / sub-type, and extra data
• Officially Supported Browsers – the brainCloud portal is designed to work with Chrome, Safari and Firefox.  Users of other browsers (<cough>IE<cough>) will be warned that they may experience issues.  [There are known refresh issues with IE.]
• API Explorer – the services and operations are now displayed in alphabetical order (FINALLY!) 🙂

 

API Changes / Additions

• GetSalesInventoryByCategory() method added to Products service – used to retrieve all IAP products of a certain type.

 

Misc. Changes / Fixes

• Admin | Company Info page –  we now display the user id for the billing account for easy reference
• JavaScript client – Async match parameters updated to match other clients, and fixed handling of optional parameters
• Java client – missing product methods have been added to the Java client
• Leaderboard configuration – the portal now warns you that changing the tournament refresh settings (start date, frequency, etc) requires that all leaderboard entries be deleted.
• Miscellaneous documentation updates

We’re pleased to present Release 2.8.0.

This one had to cook in the oven a bit longer than we’d hoped, but we think the results are worth it.  This release is chock full of feature fixes and enhancements (see details below), but first an important announcement:

Our new billing system is in place! Yay, automatic monthly billing! Hurray sustainable business models! 

Hmm, clearly we’re more excited about this than you guys. 🙂

How does this impact you?

If you are still in development, then it doesn’t.  brainCloud continues as always to be free during development – zero, zip, nada.

If your app is currently live, then you’ll want to push the [Go Live!] button in our system to ensure that we don’t start enforcing the “in development” restrictions on your app.  (i.e. like 100 daily users max, no non-sandbox in-app-purchases, maximum 1000 lifetime users, etc.).  You’ll need to set up a Billing Account with your payment information – it’s all detailed here.  (Note – you have until May 25th, 2015 to Go Live! before the new restrictions come into effect.)

One other note – we’ve updated our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Acceptable Usage policies.  You’ll be asked to re-accept them the next time you log into the portal.

Release Highlights

• Managing and Publishing Apps – We’ve re-designed our app management screens to allow you to better manage your Apps through the development and publishing lifecyle.  For more information, check out our guide pages on Managing Apps and Publishing Apps.
• Open Source Unity Client – you’ve asked, we’ve delivered. I’m pleased to announce that the source code for our Unity Client is now available on GitHub.  You can find it at http://github/getbraincloud.  We’ve just got the Unity Client and some examples there for now, but we plan to release more of the clients in the future.
• Facebook Integration Improvements – Facebook has been busy, changing the requirements for minimum API levels for new apps (and removing their support for FQL).  We’ve made some short-term changes to accomodate, but are also making some longer-term changes to our approach to allow us to better keep up with their ever-changing API.
• Push Notifications – streamlined the configuration and usage of push notifications.  New configuration screen.  iOS configuration now validates the certificate that is uploaded, determining whether it’s a production or sandbox certificate.  The appropriate servers will be utilized during pushes according to the certificate configured.
• External Identity Support – we’ve added the ability to easily integrate with 3rd party directories.  More info here.
• Unity IL2CPP Compatibility – Finally, we’ve recently updated our Unity Libraries to support their new IL2CPP Compiler.  64-bit iOS here we come!

Portal Changes

• New Design | Authentication section in the portal, with the new External Identity feature being configured here.  In the next release, the rest of the Authentication settings (E-mail authentication, Facebook authentication, etc.) will move over to this section as well.
• Multiple pages revamped to better support Publishing Apps and our new Billing system:
  • Admin | Home page – now display’s your company’s billing Account Status
  • Admin | Apps page – enhanced to display the Publishing status of your app, and whether any run-time restrictions are being applied.  Includes a new actions menu to Go Live, Apply Coupons, etc.
  • Admin | Company Info page – provides access to the Billing Portal for configuring payment methods, etc.
  • Reporting | API Usage – now includes a proper breakdown of all counts that contribute to the API Usage metric
• New Push Notification configuration screen (Design | Notifications | Settings)
• New User Summary page (Monitoring | User Monitoring | User Summary) – presents key information about the user in a more logical manner.  Also includes a cool new ability to log into the API Explorer as this user – see the [Login as User] button in the bottom-right of the screen — great for trouble-shooting!

API Changes / Additions

• CashInItunesReceipt() renamed to VerifyItunesReceipt in C++ libs and API Explorer
• New HttpClientServiceProxy object is now availble for S2S and Cloud Code
• Removed the deprecated Leaderboard API parameters, as per the notes in the 2.7.0 release notes
• New ExternalAuthenticate() method used for integrating with external user directories

Misc. Changes / Fixes

• Features
  • Improved Exception Handling in Cloud Code scripts.
  • Clan Cloud Code example (as part of exception handling documentation).
  • iOS Push Notification interval removed from developer settings (we’ll control this centrally in brainCloud)
• Fixes
  • Fixed defect where some Global Entities could not be viewed / edited from the Monitoring section of the portal
  • VerifyMicrosoftReciept() method added to the  API Explorer
• Documentation improvements
  • Matchmaking – updated to clarify that Matchmaking needs to be explicitely enabled for a player to be eligible
  • Server-to-Server – additional documentation in place