Release History

brainCloud 5 is live!

brainCloud 5 is finally here – and it will boost your team’s productivity to new heights!

brainCloud 5 features:

  • New Design Portal (Portal-X) – our completely re-designed and re-engineered web environment
  • New Integrated Forums to build community
  • New brainCloud BootCamp tutorial videos to get developing in brainCloud quickly
  • New Documentation system – to allow you to find what you need faster (even from within our script editor!) (coming soon!)

But don’t take my word for it – check out our trailer!

We will be adding tons of new features to the brainCloud 5 platform in the coming months.

Stay tuned – and thanks for choosing brainCloud!

Release Highlights

Portal-X

Our next generation portal, Portal-X, is now the default for all users!

For those who don’t know, Portal-X features:

  • Completely new navigation model – quicker and easier to find things, plus mobile-friendlier!
  • All screens designed to be more scalable – for the largest apps with the largest communities!
  • New multi-pane Cloud Code Editor with syntax highlighting!
  • Dark and light mode support!
  • RTT-enabled API Explorer!
  • New Dashboards and analytics screen for more information on your apps!

For more information on some of the basics on Portal-X – check out the brainCloud 4.15 release notes. Or go to https://portalx.braincloudservers.com now and give it a try!

Information

Note – our legacy portal will continue to be available for the next few releases. You can access it by selecting “Switch to Legacy View” from the right-hand Personal Panel menu in Portal-X.

Forums Integration

We realize that our existing Forums don’t get used much. We aim to change that!

Not only does our new Team Dashboard prominently feature the latest forum posts – but starting in 5.0 users will now be automatically signed into the forums if you launch them from Portal-X!

So please – take a moment – explore the forums – and give us some feedback on brainCloud 5!

brainCloud BootCamp

We are very pleased to announce the general availability of brainCloud BootCamp – our new online training site!

We have been working on these lessons for over a year – and are super-happy to be able to finally be able to share them with you!

There are over 75+ video lessons available – organized into two “Bootcamp” courses to start:

  • Unity Bootcamp – Everything you need to know to get brainCloud up-and-running in Unity!
  • Unreal Bootcamp – Everything you need to know to get brainCloud up-and-running in Unreal!

And the best part – Bootcamp is completely free!

Check them out at https://bootcamp.braincloudservers.com

Additional Features

In addition to the new brainCloud 5 features – there are some important functionality-level additions in this release.

These features include:

  • Updated google purchase integration – Google has made a bunch of changes in the past few months and we’re just catching up! brainCloud 5.0 adds support for Google Play Billing Library version 5.
  • Improved iOS Appstore purchases – a new parameter allows apps to exclude returning old purchases in receipt data. Especially helpful when dealing with recurring subscriptions.
  • Email “cc” and “bcc” field support – has been added to the SendAdvancedEmailByAddress() api call.
  • Send events to multiple profiles – in a single call (see API section).
  • Improved Long-lived lobby support – servers can send SYS_ROOM_KEEP_ALIVE calls to lobbies to ensure stay around as long as the room/relay servers themselves.

Server improvements

  • Server support for System RTT Connections ← we will be building on this
  • Better RTT Manager & Event Server connection management – improves RTT scalability
  • Better detection of duplicate packet ids (server-side)

Client Libraries and Examples

  • Unity
    • updated Authentication Example – includes Google, GoogleOpenID, Apple and Facebook authentication.
  • Unreal
    • added TCP Support for Relay Comms
  • C#
    • Improvements to JsonResponseBundleV2 deserialization
  • JavaScript
    • Updated our JavaScript libraries to work better with K6
    • Produced updated K6 example package
  • Objective-C / Swift 
    • Updated to JSonCpp 1.1.4
    • Updated Swift examples for XCode 14.3
    • Cocoapods updated

Portal Changes

Of course – all of Portal-X is new!

But you’ve had access to it in the 4.15 preview – so we will focus on the new features this release.

Note that these new features only refer to Portal-X. We will no longer be making feature enhancements to the legacy portal (though we may deprecate features for safety reasons in the coming months).

We have made the following portal changes:


Team Menu

  • Dashboard
    • The Helpful Links section has been updated to provide more helpful links!
    • The Recent Forum Posts section now integrates more tightly with the Forums – and will automatically log the user (creating an account if necessary) if a forum link is clicked.

App Menu

  • Dashboard
    • Dashboard graphs now work properly in Safari!
  • Design > Admin Tools > Deployment
    • A new option, “Do not migrate Global Entities”, has been added to the deployment screen – but it is not editable in 5.0. This option is related to new Global Entity enhancements coming in a future release.
  • Design > Cloud Code > Scripts
    • The editor now stays in Edit mode after the script is saved.
    • The script editor now automatically senses the tab settings for a script. Those settings can not be overridden by the developer as well.
    • Improved handling of editor sessions and script versions.
  • Reports > Usage > Profile
    • The Profile screen provides a useful summary of the feature and resource usage of the app.
  • Reports > Usage > Script Usage
    • The new Script Usage screen can be used to get a better understanding of the performance profile of an app’s cloud code scripts.
    • It is especially helpful when optimizing and app to improve performance / api count usage.

API Changes

The following changes/additions have affected the brainCloud API:

  • Event Service
    • SysSendEventToProfiles() – can be used to send an event to multiple users. (Technically each user receives their own copy of the event).
  • Lobby Service
    • SysRoomKeepAlive() – can be used by a running server to ensure that the Lobby associated with the server sticks around for the lifetime of the server. The lobby data contains a new field, keepAliveRateSeconds, that tells the server how often to send the heartbeat.
  • Mail Service
    • SendAdvancedEmailByAddress() – enhanced to support “cc” and “bcc” addresses
  • User Service
    • SysDeleteUser() – new Sys API for deleting a user account. Includes the option to automatically delete all child profiles as well. 

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes

  • Documentation updates
    • Our legacy documentation site has been updated with the latest 5.0 APIs
    • We also have a brand new documentation site that we will be rolling out very soon!
  • Important Fixes
    • TBC
  • Plus miscellaneous fixes and performance enhancements…
Posted September 1, 2023