Up until now players who were queued in an IMS Matchmaker queue had no indication on whether they are likely to be formed into a match soon.
To address this, we have now introduced a new variable playerCount which states the number of players who are also in the same queue as the current player.
IMS zeuz already offers game server orchestration, plug and play with our IMS Matchmaker or your own backend. We now have introduced the ability to reach out to Quality of Service Ping Beacons to provide the best gaming experience to your players.
Each of our server region now deploys UDP-base Ping Beacons your game client can reach out to for latency measurement. Feed that information to your matchmaker backend to allow for dynamic QoS based region selection.
We are glad to announce the beta launch of our advanced DDoS protection for IMS game hosting.
Even though many game hosting providers come with some baseline DDoS attack protections, they are often ineffective against more sophisticated attacks. We have joined force with industry leading DDoS protection providers to give you a best-in-class solution.
The solution offers a network mitigation capacity of over 155 Tbps, instant threat detection, and a time to mitigate (TTM) under 3 seconds for most threats. It will protect your game against the most sophisticated and multi-vector DDoS attacks.
You can now disable allocations in the console or via the IMS CLI!
Disabling an allocation will initiate the draining of the allocation by stopping the provisioning of new payloads and waiting for currently reserved payloads to be released. Once this is done, the allocation is effectively disabled and no computing resources are attached to it. You can of course re-enable an allocation whenever you need it.
Iterating over your IMS integration by uploading your game image and updating an allocation can be time consuming. We just released a mock Payload Local API server that you can use to test your game server integration locally. This means faster development and testing, and ultimately a faster integration with our services.
The mock API server is packaged as part of the latest IMS CLI release. Documentation for this feature is available here.
We have created a demo project that demonstrates how to incorporate IMS Zeuz and Session Manager into your Unity game!
The GitHub repository for the game can be found here.
We've added a Grafana dashboard that displays a curated set of metrics we've identified best representing the performance of the payload, including:
Gone are the days of remembering and manually entering cluster IDs. Creating an allocation just got easier. Now you just select from your available regions in the allocation form.
Clusters IDs are still used on the API side, so we have included the Cluster IDs in the UI making it easy to look up which cluster an allocation is running on.
Some of you like to build out your own internal tooling that allows you to deploy your game servers to IMS. One frequently requested feature was an API to view and manage game server images.
Today we have opened up access to the Game Image Inventory API, this allows you to perform common operations: list, get, and delete. It uses the same authentication flow as the IMS zeuz APIs so should plug straight into your workflows.
You can find out more in the OpenAPI spec
We know the IMS CLI hasn't always been the most consistent, so we recently overhauled the output over every command, resulting in a cleaner, more consistent output.
image publish)When using the JSON output type we still output the pretty "human" log lines, these are forwarded to stderr so that your terminal still displays them, but they do not impact your ability to parse the JSON output which is forwarded to stdout.
Additionally, since the color and styled output may interfere with CI tooling such as Jenkins we default to plaintext output when the --ci flag is present. You can override this behavior with the --output-type flag.
Our most recent quality of life update for the Game Logs dashboard adds allocation_id and payload_id as log fields.
You can also now quickly navigate to the other logs from a specific payload by using the payload_logs link.
We have recently improved the way to find out why payloads exited with an error. You can see game server exit messages and codes in the web console and the payload history Grafana dashboard.