Okay, this one got away from us a little bit. The release is absolutely chock-full of new features – hopefully there is something for everyone!

Release Highlights

Team Member Roles

brainCloud now supports assigning permissions to Team Members on an app-by-app basis. The roles available are pre-defined (we don’t offer custom roles yet), but we’ve taken considerable care in defining a flexible set of roles based on customer feedback. And of course, you can combine roles to meet your needs.

Roles are assigned via the new Administration | Permissions page, which is accessible by Team Administrators. You can view the individual privileges that make up each role via the Roles tab of the page.

Live Lock

While we were implementing our permissions system, we decided to go one step further, and implement an extra level of protection for Live apps. The result is our new Live Lock feature, which ensures that you don’t inadvertently edit the configuration of your live app, even if you have the privileges to do so.

Our new “App is Live” banner will display on the portal pages for live apps, and will prevent the app from being modified without the user first unlocking it. Once unlocked, the banner turns yellow as a warning to be careful. Apps remain unlocked for the duration of your session – so it won’t unnecessarily affect your workflow.

Parse Import

As you might expect, brainCloud has seen an uptick in new sign-ups due to the Parse shutdown. We’ve received great feedback from our new arrivals, who find that brainCloud not only matches Parse’s featureset, but truly offers a whole lot more.

In an effort to be extra welcoming, we are pleased to roll-out Phase 1 of brainCloud’s Parse Migration support – which allows for easy importing of Parse data into our Cloud Data system (as Global Entities). This facility is especially useful for teams that had Parse apps in development, and want to quickly import their data and keep moving forward with a brainCloud-based implementation.

This is just the first step of our plan to assist customers migrate their apps from Parse. Stay tuned as we add additional features in the coming weeks, and be sure to fill in our Parse Migration Survey to ensure that your requirements are heard.

New <Beta> API Reference

New, faster, more searchable API documentation? Don’t mind if we do!

The new system is in beta, and the examples focus primarily on C# for now – but we think it’s already better than the old reference documentation – so we’re releasing it early. Going forward, our overview and tutorials will remain under the Docs header, with service and method references in the new system under API.

Let us know what you think! Check out the new docs here!

Swift and Objective-C CocoaPods

We’ve totally refactored our Apple libraries to work better with Swift and Objective-C, and repackaged them using CocoaPods to make them easier to integrate into your projects.

There are two CocoaPod libraries available:

• BrainCloud – for Objective-C and Swift projects
• BrainCloudCpp – for C++ projects

These libraries support iOS, OS X and tvOS.

You can find more information on using CocoaPods in your Xcode project in their Guides section.

Portal Changes

The following changes have been made to the Design Portal:

• (New) Administration | Permissions screen – used to set per-app permissions for your Team Members. Only accessible by Team Administrators.
• (New) Live Lock banner – tells you whether you app is live, and allows you to unlock it for editing.
• (New) Parse Import – available from the Global Monitoring | Global Entity screen.
• (Improved) User Monitor – we now display the User’s Profile picture if they have attached their Facebook identity.
• (Improved) Select Team screen – we’ve updated the look of the Select Team screen that appears immediately upon login. And as a bonus, it automatically remembers the last team that you logged into – allowing you to quickly skip past by clicking the [Continue] button
• (Improved) Edit Profile dialog – you can view your app access permissions by choosing Edit Profile from the sign out menu drop-down.
• (Improved) Log Viewer – you can now click through from the Global Logs to the User Logs by clicking on the profile id in any log entry.
• (Improved) Analytics Charts – improved and standardized the colors used in the charts on our Analytics page.

API Changes

There have been significant changes to the error handling and communication subsystems in several of the libraries. We recommend that you test well before updating clients in the field.

• Network Error Message Caching
  • This feature allows you to cache in-transit messages to the brainCloud server when a network error occurs.
  • More details can be found here
• Global Error callback
  • brainCloud now allows you to register a Global Error callback method which is called anytime an error is encountered.
• Authentication methods returning 202 error now go to error callback.
  • This only applies to C++ and Unreal libraries. If you’d prefer the old behaviour, you call BrainCloudClient.setErrorCallbackOn202Status(false)
• New Matchmaking API call
  • FindPlayerWithFilterAndAttributes() method added – allows the system to narrow the list of candidates before sending each candidate to the players custom filter. Useful for when the population of users you are looking for is a very small portion of the overall population.
• Improved Web Service APIs
  • We’ve added support for POST operations with external web services
  • We’ve also simplified the API so that you don’t have to repeat the URL being used (since you’re already declaring the URL as part of the external service configuration)
• Push Notifications
  • New server-to-server method, SendNormalizedToSegments(), for sending push notifications with custom parameters
  • New server-to-server method for returning a list of segments
• Leaderboards
  • Social Leaderboard calls now properly support LOWER_IS_BETTER leaderboards by returning the results in ascending order
• Miscellaneous
  • New method for looking up a user’s credentials given their profileId – GetExternalIdForProfileId()
  • UpdateContactEmail() method added which allows you to update the user’s email address (used for informational purposes, not authentication, which is controlled via the EmailIdentity)
  • Added API for generating anonymous id (GUID) to the Android / Java libs

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes

• New Apple SDKs!  Our new iOS / Mac OS X / Apple TV SDKs have been revamped with better Objective-C and Swift support – and are now packaged using CocoaPods for easy addition to your projects!
• Revamped the Android Getting Started documentation
• Roku has been added as a supported platform
• New Marmalade C++ Client SDK
• Improved searching for users in User Monitoring – search now looks for a sub-string of the text entered
• Improved user logs performance
• Miscellaneous fixes and performance improvements

On Thursday, Facebook dropped a bomb. They announced that they were shutting down Parse, the Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) platform that they acquired in 2013.

Parse is one of brainCloud’s competitors, and arguably the biggest and most established player in the BaaS industry. Even so, brainCloud doesn’t run up against them that much because we have a richer, more specialized featureset that works better for our customer base.

In the wake of this event, it is inevitable that people are asking “What happened?” and “How can we trust any BaaS to build our business upon”. To that end, I thought I’d put together a few thoughts.

Why was Parse shut down?

The internet is a-buzz with comments that the business must have been failing.

I don’t buy that. The business case for the Backend-as-a-Service market is very strong, and Parse had a good product for the space they were aimed at. By all accounts, they had plenty of customers and an overall strong business. So why close it?

The answer is that Parse no longer aligned with the goals of it’s parent company, Facebook.

At the time that Parse was acquired, Facebook was floundering. They had recently IPO’d, but hadn’t figured out their mobile and advertising strategy. The stock was down, revenues were down – and they made a series of acquisitions hoping to strengthen and diversify their portfolio. Parse, well positioned as a platform for enabling mobile apps, seemed like a smart play to help them build up their mobile presence. And I’d say it was.

But now, almost three years later, things have changed. Facebook has totally turned it’s ship around. It is now a juggernaught in mobile, has advertising sales through the roof, and is more focused than ever on building out its core product. In managing everything it is doing, Facebook needs to continually ask itself: “Is <x> strategic to our overall success?”

And I think that’s where Parse failed the test. Parse’s business was probably $50-$100M per year. Healthy, for sure – heck, we’d take it! But that’s just a drop in the bucket to Facebook (less than 1% of revenue!), which will net close to $20B this year. And yet, I’ll bet that division had some of Facebook’s best engineers!

And that’s what it comes down to – Facebook said as much in their blog post. They are going to “focus their resources elsewhere.” I don’t think this is the normal generic excuse that a company makes when they announce bad news – in this case, I believe that it is very literally what they are doing.

Who can you trust?

In the wake of the Parse shut-down, a lot of people will be wondering how they can put their trust in any Backend-as-a-Service. After all, a ton of people probably chose Parse specifically because it was run by Facebook – a huge, incredibly successful organization, that was guaranteed to be around for years to come.

Here is my suggestion on the evaluation criteria to consider:

1. Feature Set – always start with the features – there is no point in going for a solution that doesn’t meet your needs.
2. Organization – consider the organization that develops it. Are they a long-standing, established business, that has earned a solid reputation in the marketplace?
3. Funding – how is the company/product funded? Beware of purely VC-funded companies. A lot of BaaS vendors are early stage VC-funded – this makes for splashy million dollar announcements and marketing materials, but the funding comes with strings attached, in terms of “You must succeed by <x> or you will be shut down.”
4. Business Model – does the business model make sense? Is it easy to understand how the business would make money for the organization? If not, be wary – a “too good to be true”business model is often a sign of a last-ditch “hail mary” throw for success.
5. Alignment – Does the product align with the strategic goals of the parent organization. No matter how good the product, Facebook has just proven that you are in danger if a clear alignment isn’t there.

Given this critera, how does brainCloud rate?

1. Feature Set – we pride ourselves on our features, and the rapid pace at which they are evolving. With brainCloud (especially in comparison to a lower-level offering like Parse), you spend less time building features and more time using them. And we match each new feature with a visual tool for configuring and managing it.brainCloud goes over-and-above the classic BaaS capabilities with support for Gamification (xp, milestones, quests, achievements, leaderboards, etc.), Segmented Push Notifications, Scheduled Cloud Code, Auto Promotions, Mobile Multiplayer, Shared User Accounts, External Authentication, Server-to-Server APIs, a dynamic DataStream Architecture, and much much more.
2. Organization – brainCloud is built by bitHeads, a 20-year old technology software developer based in Ottawa, Canada, in conjunction with playBrains, our game development subsidiary. bitHeads has earned a reputation as one of the top software development companies in Canada, and through the years has built award-winning products for Microsoft, Sony, Blackberry, Canada Post, Samsung, E*Trade, Nortel, Mitel, and hundreds of others.
3. Funding – brainCloud is privately funded by bitHeads, its parent organization, with some assistance from various Canadian government programs. We are privately controlled, and thus no ultimatums.We started building brainCloud over four years ago, well before the term BaaS or MBaaS was a thing. We saw the value and opportunity in this market back then, and are determined to build the best product for it.
4. Business Model – we don’t give brainCloud away, but we do work to keep the cost of the service as low as possible. brainCloud is free for development (maximum 100 dau), but you pay starting at $30 / month once you go live. This minimal charge ensures that every brainCloud customer is pulling their weight and paying their share of the costs for the service. This allows us to offer lower prices than our competitors, while at the same time ensuring that bitHeads can operate brainCloud indefinitely.
   
   Contrast that with the models of some of our competitors, and ask yourselves how they can possibly be successful in the mid-to-long term? They have to charge their paid users more, and are basically betting that they will have enough high-volume customers to pay for the inevitably huge number of low-volume customers (that they subsidize for free). And some models are even crazier! These are the sorts of bets that you make when you are desperate for your next round of VC funding, or looking to be bought.
5. Alignment – brainCloud arose because bitHeads was constantly building custom backend solutions for our customers. And we were building them over-and-over again, with largely the same features. For online casinos. Retail networks. Telecommunications. Mobile/Social games. For twenty years.Four years ago, we finally said, wait – what if we did this once, and productized it, so that we (nor anyone else) has to keep re-inventing the wheel? And thus brainCloud was born. It started as a small, separate team working within the company to build the core server system. We released the first apps on the platform almost three years ago – before we had a design portal with which to design and manage things (configuration was CSV and JSON back then).Today the team consists of twenty-ish people within the larger bitHeads/playBrains organization, together with the support teams to make that work. All services teams at bitHeads are aligned to delivering products and services around brainCloud. The custom apps and games that we build today are built upon brainCloud – it’s our competitive advantage. And we continue to productize and evolve the platform based on the feedback of our great community of developers.There’s no fear of alignment here – bitHeads is brainCloud.

And there you have it – my take on Parse, and how bitHeads and brainCloud rate as a Backend-as-a-Server that you can trust. To our brainCloud customers today, thanks a bunch – rest assured, we are in this for the long haul.

And if this is your first exposure to brainCloud, please sign up and take a look for free. If you take a good look at our features and tools, we think you’ll realize the power of the system we’ve developed, and the passion of the folks building it.

Oh – and if you are looking to move from Parse, please check out this survey. Filling it out will help us to prioritize the tools and support processes that we’re developing to assist Parse migration.

Happy coding folks!

Paul.

(PS – And for all you Parse-based folks looking to move, feel free to reach out. Our services teams would be happy to help you move over to our platform!)

We hope the holidays were good to everyone. The brainCloud team took a few days to relax and regroup with family, and now we’re back at it. Release 2.20.0 delivers some key customer-requested features, and sets the stage for a bunch more.

Without further ado, here’s what we’ve got.

Release Highlights

• Multi-team Accounts – brainCloud now allows your Team Member (i.e. Developer) account to be associated with multiple Teams (i.e. Companies). This is a much-requested feature, and will be especially useful to developers working on apps for multiple client companies, those with developer-publisher relationships, etc. You will immediately notice the new Team Selection dialog that displays after logging into the portal.

• Team Administrators – As part of the Multi-team feature, we added the concept of Team Administrators. Now, only team administrators can perform team-level operations like Manage Users, Manage and Publish Apps, Edit company billing info, etc. Note – this does not affect the access of data within individual apps – all team members still have full privileges. This is the first step towards the Role Security feature that is currently in development. Note that all existing users have Team Administrator access by default – you’ll want to go to Admin | Team Members and adjust this permission accordingly.
• User Files – this release brings support for storage of User Files – that is, binary files that are associated with individual apps (as opposed to our Custom Files, which are global). User Files can be organized by path (directories), can have shareable URLs, and can be up to 20 MB in size. The C++, C# (.Net/Unity), and Objective-C libraries have all been updated to support our new File APIs – which include support for uploading, listing, retrieving and managing files. Support for the other libraries will follow soon. Note – User Files are not yet visible in the Design Portal – that feature will be in an upcoming release.
  
• New Segment Criteria – we’ve added support for two new pieces of Segment Criteria: timezones and AB Test ID. Timezones are as you’d expect – the timezone that a user is in. The AB Test ID is a random number between 0 and 99 that gets assigned to every new user when they are created. If, for example, you’d like to try a sales promotion with half of your user base (to see if it effects their monetization) you could define a segment for AB Seed values of 0-49, and then associate the Promotion and any push notifications with that Segment. Note that AB Test IDs are also included in the Identity data that gets passed through our DataStream Architecture – so you can hookup any number of back-end tools to analyze the behavioural results of such a test.

Portal Changes

• Team is the New Company – given the new Multi-Team feature, the portal is now largely using the word “team” in place of “company”, which will now be used primarily for billing purposes.
• Team Selection – you’ll immediately notice the new Team Selection page that displays immediately upon logging into the portal. Just choose your team and you’re into the same portal interface you’re used to — you are only ever logged into a single team at a time. But never fear, switching active teams is quick and easy – just click on the team name from the right-hand-corner menu.

• Team Members Screen – has been revamped to show whether a member has Team Administrator privilege, and who how many apps they have access to. Currently all users have access to all apps, but that will change when we add our Role Security feature in the near future. Also note that you no longer Delete team members, you Remove them from your team. The user’s TeamMember account will continue to exist – allowing it to still be used to log into other teams.
• Edit Team Member – Users may now change their e-mail address, as well as their password. Team Members (even Team Administrators) may no longer change another Team Member’s password.
• Reporting | API Usage – File Storage stats are now reported in the section with File Transfer stats. Note – we don’t currently extrapolate the amount of storage that we think will be used by the end of the month.
• Timezones – we’ve expanded the list of options in the Timezone selector of the portal. You are welcome Newfoundland! 🙂

API  Changes / Additions

• New User Files API – A robust API for uploading, listing, and managing files. Supports files up to 20MB in size. See the BrainCloudFile api docs page.
• Update Picture URL – now that you can upload files, it makes sense that users can have custom profile pics. So just upload the file (with a shareable URL), and then set the picture URL accordingly.
• Session expiry – the Client Libraries have been enhanced to better handle session errors (session expired, invalidated due to login, etc.). This includes fixing heartbeats so that they no longer get sent if the session is gone.
• Client libraries have been updated for this release. As always, if your app is currently live, we recommend that you test thoroughly before releasing on the updated libraries.

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes

• New, clearer error message returned when apps “in development” have reached their daily active user limit.
• System now returns better error information if Google Push support has not been properly configured.
• Additional data integrity checks when deleting dependent items in the portal – i.e. deleting an Achivement that is referred to by an XP Level, etc.
• Apple and Android device tokens (for push notifications) are now deleted if they are reported as invalid by Apple and/or Google’s servers.
• Miscellaneour fixes and performance improvements

Firstly, a reminder that we are on reduced support availability over the holidays while our team spends some well-earned time with their families (Dec 24th, 2015 – Jan 4th, 2016).  The servers of course will still be fully monitored, and we’re definitely still available to respond to emergencies.

This being our holiday release, we thought we’d try to finish off the year by focusing on a few more customer requests. There’s something in here for everyone!

Release Highlights

Key features of this release include:

• Profanity Filter API + WebPurify Integration – we’ve had several requests from developers to support profanity filtering in the platform. Although simple enough in concept, profanity filtering gets pretty complicated when you start taking into account multiple languages, custom whitelists and blacklists, identifying vs. replacing profane strings, etc. We’ve addressed this in two parts – we’ve added a new abstract Profanity Filter API to brainCloud, and partnered with the good folks at WebPurify to allow you to easily add profanity filtering to your apps.
• User Export [Beta] – we’ve always said that brainCloud’s data is your data – and we happily provide custom exports when requested. That said, it’s a lot more efficient to provide a way for you to export your user data yourself – which is of course what our new User Export feature is for. So, whether you are looking to do some additional analytics analysis, or maybe import your user e-mails into a mailing list platform – brainCloud now supports exporting the data you need in both .CSV and .JSON formats.
• Idle timeouts – we’ve refactored how the Design Portal handles user timeouts. To start, we’ve extended the timeout to 1 hour (from 20 minutes) – but we’ve also added a dialog to warn you that the session is about to timeout, and to definitely tell you once you have timed out. We’re much happier with the new system. Let us know what you think.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• WebPurify Integration settings – can be found in Design | Integrations | Manage Integrations. You simply enter the WebPurify API key, and choose what languages to filter on. Note that you can choose to automatically filter the user’s name field. If selected, brainCloud will automatically filter all calls to UpdatePlayerName() – and raise an exception if the name contains profanity. You can get a WebPurify account for as little as $15 / month at www.webpurify.com. Note that for brainCloud billing purposes, calls to WebPurify are counted as an external web service API call.
• Refresh button in Custom Files – we now cache the list of custom files, so we no longer have to access the file system to retrieve the directory.  This cache is updated each time a new file is added or deleted – but should you have reason to think that it’s out-of-date, just hit the [Refresh File List] button on the Design | Custom Config |  Files page.
• Export User Data – available under Reporting.  You can specify some filter criteria for which users to export, as well as select what types of data to include. We support both .CSV and .JSON file formats. Note – there are more data options associated with the JSON format (since it’s more flexible).
• Web Idle Timer – we’ve refactored how the web portal handles user timeouts. We’ve extended them timeouts, added better activity tracking, and improved the communication of when the session has expired. Let us know what you think.

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the API:

• Profanity Filter API – There are 3 key methods for the Profanity Filter API – ProfanityCheck() returns true if foul language is found; ProfanityReplaceText() will actually replace bad words with a substitution character that you provide; and ProfanityIdentifyBadWords() returns a list of the bad words found (mostly useful for debugging). Remember, you need to set up a WebPurify() account to enable these APIs.
• Player State JSON enhancements – we’ve enhanced our Authentication and ReadPlayerState() calls to return additional user data – basically all the info that is displayed in the User Summary page of User Monitoring. So in addition to the slew of data that was already being returned, you now get emailAddress, createdAt, lastLogin, previousLogin, language, timezoneOffset, amountSpent (in cents) and refundCount.  Note that amountSpent refers to the reference price that you specify in the IAP entries, and is not a precise estimate of what a user paid, since it doesn’t take into account currency exchanges, the platform’s take, etc.

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes

Additional improvements to this release:

• Big performance boost to GetFileList() and GetUpdatedFiles().  We now cache the data instead of reading from the file system each time – so performance is now approximately 3 times faster!
• brainCloud is now available directly from the Unity Asset Store!  (The brainCloud Bombers and brainCloud Space Shooter example games are there too!)  Feel free to drop by and give us a review! 
• All client libraries have been updated with the latest APIs
• Misc defect and performance fixes

Release Highlights

This release marks the debut appearance of a key roadmap item for brainCloud – our DataStream Architecture. Currently in beta, the concept behind DataStream is to enable a meaningful flow of data and events from your apps to value-added tools. And to do this as painlessly as possible – i.e. little to no client code – leveraging the data and server-side interactions that brainCloud already knows about.

DataStream is being implemented with the concept of extensible channels – which will be used to enable a great variety of integrations.

Our first channel is a doozy – Segment.com.  Connecting to Segment instantly gives us over 100 service integrations – including MixPanel, Google Analytics, Heap, Treasure Data and more.  There’s even support for generic webhooks.

Trying out DataStream is very simple. To do so:

• Register for a free Segment Developer account, and create a project to use
• Go to the brainCloud portal, and enter the Segment project information in the new Design | Integration section
• Optionally connect another service to Segment – like MixPanel, Google Analytics, etc.

That’s it – once you do this brainCloud will immediately begin sending the following events:

• Identify – contains base information (like profile id, name, e-mail etc) about a user interacting with Segment. Sent before we send any other events associated with that user.
• Login – triggered when a user logs in (via the Authenticate API)
• Register – triggered when a new user account is created (via the Authenticate API)
• RecordedScore – triggered when a user posts a score to a leaderboard
• LevelledUp – triggered when a user gains an experience level
• AwardedAchievement – triggered when a user is awarded an achievement
• AwardedMilestone – triggered when a user is awarded a milestone
• AwardedQuest – triggered when a user is awarded a quest
• WasSentNotification – triggered when a remote push notification was sent to the user
• CompletedOrder – triggered when a user completes an IAP purchase

In addition, your app can send custom events of it’s own (from the client or via Cloud Code).  There is a new DataStream service with three methods to support this:

• CustomTrackEvent – used to track custom user behaviours throughout your app – for example, a puzzle game might record “RoundStarted” with information on what round the user is playing, and what boosts they’ve selected for the round, together with a “RoundCompleted” event that summarizes the results. CustomTrackEvent() takes as parameters the name of the event, and set of custom key+value pairs for attributes.
• CustomScreenEvent – used to record that the user i
• CustomPageEvent – same as the above, but oriented toward web pages

Billing note – in addition to the regular tracking of API calls, each event sent out on a DataStream Channel counts as an additional API count.

We are very excited about the new possibilities that DataStream opens up for brainCloud apps – give it a try and send us feedback!

Additional Highlights

Additional features of this release include:

• Push Notification refactoring– we’ve refactored our push notification support to make it more efficient and reliable. Although none of the existing Client APIs have changed, you’ll notice:
  • Device tokens now expire after a settable period of time. This helps to keep all tokens recent and reliable, and also to ensure you’re not wasting API counts sending notifications to long-gone users.
  • Invalid Device Tokens (flagged by iOS and Android servers) are now automatically removed from profiles
  • Devices will no longer receive notifications from multiple users – if your app allows users to log in and out, it was possible to end up with multiple users with the same hardware device token. This is no longer possible – a token can now be associated with one and only one user.  That said, if you allow users to log out, you will call the new RemoveDeviceToken() call just before the logout, to ensure that the user’s profile no longer refers to the device.
  • There is a new Delete All Tokens menu option in the Design | Notifications | Settings screen, which allows you to clear all tokens of specific type (iOS, Android, etc.).  This is useful for when you switch between Sandbox and Production certificates on iOS, and you want to delete all the old tokens.
• Redemption Code Improvements – we’ve made some changes under the covers to make our implementation more efficient at high volumes of codes. The biggest change is that scan codes are no longer local to a code type, but are now global across all code types for an app id. This saves us a bunch of index space, and in practice better matches the datasets of our customers anyway.
• API Pre- and Post- Hook Improvements – we’ve improved the capabilities of API Pre- and Post- Hooks. As you may or may not know, Pre- and Post- hooks allow you to change the behaviours of brainCloud’s API calls themselves – inserting code to be run before and/or after the API call completes. Pre-hooks can now have the ability to change the parameters being sent into the API call. And Post-hooks can now access the original parameters sent to the API (providing useful context).
• Updated Unreal plug-in – Finally, we’ve made improvements to our Online Subsystem portion of our Unreal 4 libraries.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• Moved Email Authentication section – we’ve moved the Email Authentication settings from the Advanced Settings page to their own page under Design | Authentication.
• New Integrations section – we’ve added a new Design | Integrations section, which currently contains only the Segment integration from our new DataStream feature
• Revamped Notification Settings – the settings dialogs have been revamped to be clearer, and we’ve added an expiry drop-down.  You can also choose to delete existing iOS or Android device tokens.
• Get Test Redemption Codes – you can now search your datafill for a redemption code to use during testing.  You the Type and State of the code, and brainCloud will display the first one that matches. Available from the Global Monitoring | Redemption Codes screen.
• Reset Universal Authentication passwords – you may now reset the password of Universal Authentication users via the design portal. Simply choose the Set Password option in the new action menu displayed in the Credentials section of the User Monitoring | User Summary page.
• Managing Device Tokens – device tokens are used to push notifications to iOS and Android devices. The device tokens section of the User Summary page has been updated to display when the token was last registered (note – brainCloud only applies the first registration within a 24-hour period), and has a new [Reset Device Tokens] button to delete all the existing tokens for this user.

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the API:

• Push Notification Tokens – two methods have been added to allow client apps greater control over the device tokens associated with user accounts.  DeregisterPushNotificationDeviceToken() will delete the associated device token from the user profile (), and DeregisterAllPushNotificationDeviceTokens() will delete all tokens associated with the user… (useful if you app contains a global toggle to disable all notifications to the user – as it will delete all notification tokens for this user, not just the token associated with the current device).
• DataStream Events – as mentioned in the highlights section above, new API calls have been added for custom DataStream events

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes

Additional improvements to this release:

• Adjusted S2S Explorer so that it returns results in alignment with the API Explorer
• Added GlobalApp proxy to Cloud Code bridge
• Refactored C++ Comms to push common code into a single class
• Fixes to API Hook error handling – more descriptive error messages
• Miscellaneous fixes and performance improvements

   

This post is the first of our new series on best practices to observe before launching your app.

It’s an exciting feeling… Features are complete. Beta feedback incorporated. Final bits of polish applied. You are ready to launch.

Or are you? Are you sure that you have… Tested for every usage scenario? Every race condition? On each of thousands of device variations? Under unpredictable network conditions? Accounted for changing performance characteristics as your user base ramps?

Luckily you are using brainCloud – so you know your servers will handle the loads. But what about your client app? Your dev team is prepared to react and fix issues quickly – but how will you ensure that important updates make it to your users quickly?

Sure – the app stores support automatic software updates – but even so, it can take 3 weeks before the majority of your user base is using the new version of your app. That’s far too long if your app is crashing, corrupting data, and/or generally frustrating your users. In those 3 weeks your app’s ratings will take a huge hit.

This is why it is essential to implement Version Enforcement before you go live.

The good news is that brainCloud makes it easy.

Version Enforcement

brainCloud has built-in support for enforcing minimum client versions.  During authentication, in addition to transmitting information about the user that is logging in, the brainCloud client library sends two key pieces of information:

• platform – the type of device that the user is logging in from
• gameVersion – the version of the client game or app

These parameters aren’t just informational – brainCloud’s Version Enforcement feature allows you to ensure that only users of a specified version and above can log into your application. This forces out-of-date users to upgrade their clients before proceeding.

Version Enforcement is configured via the brainCloud Portal, and works in collaboration with integration code that you add to your app.

Above – the Design | Core App Info | Platforms screen

Note –  you can specify this minimum version on a per-platform basis, allowing you to accommodate staggered release schedules, different app approval processes, etc.

Integrating Version Enforcement

Integrating Version Enforcement into your app is very simple.

Follow these steps:

1. Set the app version in your client app. In most of the brainCloud client libraries, this is done via the BrainCloudClient.Initialize() function. In Unity, you can use the brainCloud Settings dialog.
   
   In either case, the version should be a string of format of “X.X” or “X.X.X” – for example, “1.0.0”.
2. Go to Design | Core App Info | Platforms, and temporarily set the minimum app version to something higher than your current app version.
3. Enhance the Authentication error handling of your app to catch the out-of-date error response – and display an appropriate message to the user. Ideally you should redirect the user to your apps store page so that he/she can trigger the update immediately. The brainCloud portal allows you to datafill the upgrade URL along with the minimum version.
   
   
4. Test to ensure that it works!

That’s it. Once this is in place, you will rest easier knowing that if (when) your users find problems in the field, that you’ll be able to push fixes to them in no time!

Release Highlights

Key features in this release:

• Apple TV Support! We’ve updated our libraries to support the new Apple TV. We can’t wait to see what you build!
• Unreal Blueprint Support! It’s been a long time coming, but we’re pleased to finally announce the availability of our Unreal plug-in, with Blueprint, C++, and [basic] Online Subsystem support.
• Redemption Codes – Planning to distribute individual codes to unlock characters / cards / etc. in your game? brainCloud’s new redemption code system is exactly what you need. More info on the feature and it’s API here.
• Long-running Cloud Code – we’ve added support for long-running Cloud Code scripts, and adapted our Cloud Code billing strategy to better support this use case.  More details below.

Those are the biggies, but there are a bunch of other changes and improvements in this release. Read on.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• Improved Timezone support – you can now specify the timezone used for viewing date+time data in the portal.  Note that the timezone will initially default to UTC – but it will remember what you set it to. Use the control in the top-right-hand corner of the portal to change the displayed timezone at any time.
• Redemption Code Screens – you’ll find new screens for the Redemption Code feature under Design | Marketplace, Global Monitoring and User Monitoring.
• Apple TV platform support – you’ll find Apple TV entries in Design | Core App Info | Platforms, as well as iTunes pricing component of Design | Marketplace | Products
• Cloud Code Timeouts – you can now set custom timeouts for your cloud code scripts from the Design | Cloud Code | Edit Scripts screen.
• Updated API Usage page – the Reporting | API Usage page has been updated to support the new cloud code billing formulas

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the API:

• Redemption Code API – added methods for Redeeming codes and retrieving the list of codes that have been redeemed by a user. The key client api methods are RedeemCode() and GetRedeemedCodes().
• Push Notifications to Segments – you can now programmatically (via the Server-to-Server API) send push notifications to all of the members a Segment.
• Authentication Timeouts – a new client method has been added to override the authentication timeout.
• Retrieve Multiple Social Leaderboards – building a game with a Candy Crush-style map? We’ve got a new API call that retrieves the top friend entries from up to 20 leaderboards that you specify. Great for putting profile pics of the lead scores onto your map! Check out GetMultiSocialLeaderboard().

We’ve also made two more important changes to the Client Libraries:

Error Handling Changes

We’ve made some enhancements to how the brainCloud Server and Client libraries work together to communicate error information.  Specifically, we’ve enhanced the <statusMessage> parameter for the error callback method to contain not only the textual message associated with the error, but actually the entire json result of the error.

This allows us to return more detailed error information, whose structure may vary on an operation by operation basis.  For example, if authentication fails because the client app’s version is obsolete, the returned error information can include a link to the app in the appstore to use to perform the software upgrade.

If by any chance your client app was parsing the <statusMessage> – most apps weren’t, because it wasn’t very useful – you can still get the old data by referencing “statusMessage.statusMessage”.  Or, you can turn this new behaviour off using the BrainCloudClient.SetOldStyleStatusMessageErrorCallback() method.

Unified Rewards Processing

In addition, we’ve unified our rewards processing to invoke a standard Rewards Handler whenever rewards (achievements, xp, milestones and quests) are awarded from one of the many APIs that do so (i.e. authenticate, increment stats, stats event, etc.).  You can now hook into that single handler to splash Achievement Unlocked onto the screen, Quest Completed!, etc…  instead of duplicating that functionality across multiple handlers.

As part of this change, brainCloud no longer automatically triggers the associated local platform Achievement.  This platform-specific code was causing porting issues as we continue to expand the list of devices that we support. By centralizing the error handling it becomes very simple for the client apps to integrate what is in most cases a single line of code to trigger the local achievement.

To register for the new Rewards Callback, call RegisterRewardCallback() in your local library.

[Important note – the standard success and failure callbacks for the API calls still trigger. The rewards callback will trigger afterwards. Usage of the rewards callback is entirely optional.]

Miscellaneous Changes / Fixes:

Additional improvements to this release:

• Fixed match expiry not working in certain situations
• Added missing reason codes to clients
• Improved timeout checking on errors in C++ client
• Improved handling of iTunes subscriptions
• Minor fix to version comparisons during authentication
• Universal authentication no longer accepts blank passwords!
• Removed entity sub-type from Player Monitor | Entities screen
• Improvements to french translations in our portal!
• Added Portal Warning for Microsoft Edge browser – stick with Chrome, Firefox or Safari for now
• Improved the links to API docs in the Explorer
• Miscellaneous documentation improvements

Cloud Code Timeouts

When we first added Cloud Code support, we envisioned folks using it primarily for optimizing their client-server calls, and/or implementing sensitive logic on the server. For that sort of usage, our standard 10-second watchdog timer made sense.

But then we added support for Scheduled Cloud Code jobs – and you guys blew the doors off our Cloud Code usage scenarios! All of a sudden folks could schedule daily, hourly, etc. scripts – and some of these scripts were making hundreds and even thousands of API calls when they run.

It didn’t take long before folks started to hit the 10-second watchdog timer, which kills your script if its still running when the timer expires. The watchdog is there to ensure that our server doesn’t get hit by javascript coding errors (think “infinite loops!”). Needless to say, it’s an important part of ensuring that our servers remain safe and reliable when executing custom scripts.

In the short-term we had to raise that 10-second timeout globally across the system to keep some of our leading clients apps running properly.  We’re pleased to have our long-term solution in place now – which allows developers to set a custom timeout value for their individual scripts.  All new scripts will default to 10-seconds – but you can individually raise the timeout as high as 60 seconds. Note – if required, it’s possible to raise it even higher. Just message our team to have them raise your limit.

Billing Changes

We’ve also tweaked how we count API calls to better reflect these new Cloud Code usage scenarios.

As you know, the power of cloud code is that combining a collection of API calls together into a single cloud code script performs better than making the calls individually from the client – and also taxes our servers less – so it’s win:win. The new formulas for counting API calls under Cloud Code take this into account, and provide a fair balance of cost to the developer (you) and covering brainCloud server utilization (phew!).

The updated rules are as follows:

• Calling a cloud code script counts as 1 API call (same as today)
• The first three API calls from within an invoked cloud code script are free
• Any remaining calls from within cloud scripts are discounted to 1/2 an API call

If your app makes moderate use of cloud scripts, using them to string together common server requests (e.g. making a combined call to post a score, update player stats, and update a user entity describing the player’s progress) – this pricing update likely doesn’t affect you at all.  This includes the great majority of our customers today.

This new strategy allows our customers the flexibility of running much more ambitious Cloud Code scripts – at a greatly reduced cost per API call invoked.

If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us through the support messaging system.

Release Highlights

Key features (and a fix) in this release:

• Parent Currency Enhancements – you can now link parent currencies to the IAP Products in child apps. This means that if you’re implementing a meta-currency across all your apps, you can configure products in the child apps that award the parent currency. This completes the currency enhancements to our Shared Accounts feature.
• Parameterized Notification Templates – by popular request, you can now include parameters in your notification templates, and invoke them using the new SendRichPushNotificationsWithParams() method. This is especially useful when you want to keep the definition of the notification text (with associated localizations) separate from the app code that invokes it.
• Authentication Fix:  We’ve made some key changes to how Authentication Timeouts are handled in all of the client libraries. The authentication timeout has been extended from 3 seconds to 15 seconds – and automatic retry has been disabled for Authentication requests. The app can still retry, but that’s at the discretion of the app developer (and assumably the user).

Authentication Fix Background:
We were finding that a small minority of (mostly slower) clients were timing out before receiving the response for Anonymous Authentication calls, especially during new account creation. When this occurred, the automatic retry behaviour of the clients was accidentally causing duplicate accounts to be created. This only applies to Anonymous Authentication calls – the other Authentication methods were not impacted by this behaviour.

We strongly recommend that all developers upgrade to the 2.16 version of the brainCloud Client Libs.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• Multiple Currencies in Products – While we were already upgrading products, we decided to add an often-requested feature. You may now link multiple virtual currencies to your in-app-purchase products – so if you want to give 5 bonus elixer with every bundle of 1000 coins that a user purchases, you can now easily do so.  We applied some overall polish to the screen as well.
• Push Button Deploy – you can now deploy changes from the development versions of your apps, straight to the production versions, without going through the export -> import process! Quicker and more reliable. Available under Design | Core App Info | Admin Tools.
• Improved Cloud Code Editor – we’ve improved the layout of our Cloud Code Editor. We’ve moved the informational portion of the cloud code script (name, description, test parameters, etc.) onto a separate page – thus maximizing the editor space. And while we were at it, we improved the automatic sizing of the window itself.
• Job Queue – we’ve enhanced the Cloud Code Job Queue screen to show both the date+time that a job was created, as well as when the job is scheduled to run.  The list is sortable by either, of course.
• Reset Device Tokens – you can now clear the device tokens for a user from the User Summary screen. Device tokens are used when sending push notifications to a user.

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the API:

• Paged User Entities – we now have a paged API for User Entities, akin to the paged Global Entities API.  See the APIDOCs for info on GetPage() and GetPageOffset().
• Matchmaking API return results trimmed – turns out that there was a defect in our matchmaking APIs, and we were inadvertantly returning the entire player object.  This has been trimmed back to return the appropriate data as designed.
• Parameterized Notifications – as mentioned in the highlights section, we now support passing dynamic parameters to rich notifications.  See the SendRichPushNotificationsWithParams() call.
• Parent Currencies – the Product APIs have been extended to accomodate parent currencies. To keep things compatible with current code, any parent currencies returned by these methods will be in their own <parentCurrency> json section, at a level peer to the current <currency> node.
• BrainCloudFriend.UpdateSummaryFriendData() method has now been moved to BrainCloudPlayerState.UpdateSummaryFriendData(). The method in the Friend class has been deprecated.
• BrainCloudGamification.ReadGameStatisticsByCategory() now moved to BrainCloudGlobalStatistics.ReadGlobalStatsByCategory()
• BrainCloudGamification.ReadPlayerStatisticsByCategory() now moved to BrainCloudPlayerStatistics.ReadPlayerStatsByCategory()
• BrainCloudMatchMaking methods GetOneWayPlayers() and GetOneWayPlayersWithFilter() have been renamed to FindPlayers() and FindPlayersUsingFilter() as these APIs can be used to find players for OneWay and Async matches.
• Retries and timeouts are now configurable using the BrainCloudClient.SetPacketTimeouts() method. By passing in an array of values you can set both the timeout for each attempt, and consequently the number of attempts. The default is 3 attempts with 10 second intervals between (e.g. {10, 10, 10}).

Misc. Changes / Fixes

Additional improvements in this release:

• New Client Library – a Linux i386 library is now available
• Miscellaneous fixes and performance improvements.

Release Highlights

Highlights of this release include:

• Shared Accounts – highly requested feature – brainCloud now allows you to share user accounts across applications. This is achieved by creating a master profile (associated with a separate App ID), which is associated with individual child profiles for each app. This is extremely powerful for companies looking to link the players across a collection of games together, or to model sub-accounts under a single Home account for a household. [i.e. think set-top box].
  For more information, see our Shared Accounts page in the API Docs.

• Facebook Notifications – we’ve always had them, but you couldn’t properly enable/disable them. Now you can turn them on/off in the Design | Notifications | Settings page on the portal. And note of course, that your app will need to ask for the appropriate Facebook permissions for them to work.
• Billing changes (Boo!) – we’ve now added support for monitoring and billing for excess file transfer usage. All Standard Plan apps get 10GB per month of free downloads. After that, it’s $0.10 USD per GB. And note, we’re only charging for the S3 file downloads – not for any of the data otherwise associated with API — that’s all covered by the API counts.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• Shared Accounts – configure parent-child app relationships under Design | Authentication | Shared Accounts.
• Parent Currencies – a child app can include parent currencies in rewards for XP level-ups, Milestones, Quests and Statistics Events. All configurable under Design | Gamification.  Parent Currencies are also visible on the Design | Marketplace | Virtual Currencies page.  Note that you cannot yet award parent currencies for IAP Product Purchases [that will come next release].
• Leaderboards – we’ve added a few additional “Are you sure?” checks to the process of resetting / deleting leaderboards, especially for live apps.
• Improved Error Reporting – we’ve improved our logging system to show errors from more sources, including Server-to-Server calls and Scheduled Cloud Code.  We’ve also added a new error category, “Sys Warnings”.  Check it out in Global Monitoring | Recent Logs.
• Profile Relations – profiles with parent or child profiles will see them listed at the bottom of the User Monitoring | User Summary page, in a section called Relations.  We’ve also moved the [Login as User] button to the top of the page for convenience.

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the APIs:

• Shared Accounts– related API enhancements:
  • Authenticate() and GetPlayerState() methods now return the id of the parent profile (if there is one), as well as any parent currency balances
  • New Identity methods for switching to/from parent and child accounts – SwitchToChildProfile(), SwitchToSingletonChildProfile(), SwitchToParentProfile() and GetChildProfiles().
  • Enhancements to currency methods to support Parent Currencies – AwardParentCurrency(), ConsumeParentCurrency(), GetParentCurrency() and ResetParentCurrency()
  • New RunParentScript() call to run a parent’s Cloud Code script (in the context of the parent profile)
• EnableLogging now implemented for Windows Comms library
• Objective-C library – better handling of optional parameters
• Java library – callback mechanism has been refined to better match the other libraries. Also, you can now receive separate error callbacks for individual API calls.

Misc. Changes / Fixes

Additional improvements in this release:

• Upgrade Push Notifications service – we’ve upgraded our underlying Push Notification libraries for greater reliability
• Updated game examples – we’ve taken a pass through our examples to ensure that they’re using our latest and greatest libraries
• Match expiry – plugged some holes in our completion of matches on Expiry timeouts
• Improved handling of database connections under load
• Miscellaneous performance improvements – mostly improvements under-the-hood to our logging subsystems
• Miscellaneous documentation improvements

Release Highlights

Highlights of this release include:

• New Client Libs* – new Linux C++ Client, Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.
• New Unity Example – we’ve built a UNET version of brainCloud Bombers
• Performance optimizations – ongoing optimizations to tune performance and scalability

* All other clients updated with the latest APIs, of course.

Portal Changes

Changes to the portal:

• Linux is now a selectable platform – see Design | Core App Info | Platforms
• Disable Event-checking – If you aren’t using events, you can disable checking for them in each message by unchecking the option in Design | Core App Info | Compatibility Settings
• Flexible User Deletion – ability to Delete all Test Users, and All but Test Users.  In portal under Design | Core App Info | Admin Tools
• File transfer usage – now being reported in API Usage section of Reporting

API Changes / Additions

Changes and additions to the APIs:

• We’re reworking our Events system a bit:
  • GetEvents() method added to support directly polling for new events
  • Authenticate() and GetPlayerState() continue to return incoming and sent events.

Misc. Changes / Fixes

Additional improvements in this release:

• Apple push notification certificates without passwords now work (before a password was *required*).
• Improved error logs – script failures being more consistently logged now, and with more information
• Improved matchmaking – we’ve improved the randomness of our matchmaking routines