Changelogs

Changelogs: September 2023

September was a month full of learning and building at Hathora! We hosted a talk at NYU Game Center, released a new version of our Lobby Service, improved the debugging experience on our platform, and made lots of other enhancements. If you’ll be in NOLA for UnrealFest, read to the end. Ready, set, let's rock and roll 🤘🎸.

Dropped a new version of our Lobby Service

3️⃣rd time’s a charm! We learned a lot listening to you during our Multiplayer Madness game jam. We updated our Lobby Service to LobbyV3 to better meet your needs.

Support for player configured shortCodes

We noticed that a lot of you wanted a way for players to configure a code when creating a lobby. We’ve now added first-class support for shortCode which allows players to provide an identifier for a lobby. roomId will still be generated as a unique identifier within Hathora. However, you can now retrieve lobby info using either roomId or shortCode. (i.e. getLobbyInfoByRoomId() & getLobbyInfoByShortCode()).

Consolidated initialConfig and state into roomConfig

Also, a lot of you were (understandably) confused with how and when to use initialConfig and lobbyState. We’ve now consolidated both of them into roomConfig. Players can pass in roomConfig when CreateLobby() is called. However, once a lobby is created, roomConfig can only be updated by the server using UpdateRoomConfig().

Improving debugging devX

Our goal is to get you all the information you need to debug your game servers in as few clicks as possible (we’ve all been paged in the middle of the night 😫).

Filter by region

If you get paged for a region specific issue, you can now filter by region to get the 10 most recently started and stopped processes. Using this sample set, quickly get logs and metrics to identify the root cause.

Search for a stopped room or process

If a player complains about an issue they’re experiencing, you can now get all the logs and metrics for that roomId with just 1 click.

Platform improvements

We’re constantly making platform improvements as we learn more. Here are a few of those changes…

New connection info URL

You might have noticed a different URL format for connection information (previously it was 1.proxy.hathora.dev but now it’s *.edge.hathora.dev).

You see this change because we changed our compute scheduler. This is part of a broader goal to enable us to horizontally scale the number of concurrent game servers (yes, we’re very scalable 🚀🌝)!

Removed aggregated logs from the application page

We heard you and we understand that aggregated application logs were more confusing than helpful. You will no longer see logs at the bottom of the application page.

Hathora on the streets

Gabi will be in NOLA for Unreal Fest. If you’re around he’d love to meet you! Message him on Discord or LinkedIn to set up some time.
We’re also hosting our first NY Tech Week event on October 18th! Spaces are limited, so reserve a spot ASAP.

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