09
Mar 10
My last 2 weeks have been filled with refactoring, cleanup, splitting and documenting. The goal: liberate the Photon DotNet client libraries from Neutron and make them their own master. The result is cleaner and more up to date.
Goodbye “NPeer” and welcome “PhotonPeer”. In fact: also welcome “LitePeer”! It implements our default application’s operations and we will give out it’s source, so you can see how you could do all this yourself.
The single interface method for operation- and status-callbacks is split into two more specific calls: “OperationResult” and “PeerStatusCallback”.
If needed, you can convert your Hashtables to strings now with the SupportClass.HashtableToString method.
Many of the “loose” constant values are now arranged into enums. As easy to use but you can print out a values name and get a better impression of what’s going on. In the interface, we still use the base types int and byte, so you can use your own, extended enums as well.
The documentation is also re-done: the complete project reference is started from scratch. Most of the overview topics are refined. Of course we’re never happy with the current state.
There are many smaller changes as well. Still, it should be no real issue to update your projects. If you’re starting with Photon and DotNet clients just now: use the RC1 SDKs.
Give it a try!
PS: Unity iPhone developers: the sample requires v1.6.
03
Mar 10
It would be great to meet up at GDC next week for a chat to learn about your plans and to explore potential business opportunities.
We have some cool demos with us.
From Thursday till Saturday we are are located in the German Pavillion #802 / 10.
12
Feb 10
Exitgames.com has just been overhauled, all Exit Games’ sites are now integrated and accessible in topmost navigation. The UI experience is shared between company home page, our products Photon, Neutron and the Shop.
Thanks to jx2 design for the dedicated adaption of our artwork to allow for this.
Happy browsing & spread the word, seeding is explicitely allowed!
se:(:
21
Dec 09
Shopping at Exit Games has never been this easy. No matter if you need a licence for Neutron or for Photon, just visit our shop, select the most suitable licence for you, register, download and off you go.
You can also opt for a free 30-day trial version to see how it works.
Visit the Exit Games Shop
14
Dec 09
We zipped and uploaded the “MMO Sample” and with this, the Island Demo of Unity3D just became a little more interactive.
This sample was shown at the Unite 2009 and is now available including the source for client- and server-side. The package includes the Photon server with setup and built applications to run out of the box, but it’s primarily targeted at developers interested in Photon.
The 23MB download “ExitGames-Photon-MMO-Sample_v1-6-2.zip” is available here.
We are looking forward to your feedback and questions.
09
Dec 09
Two bugs made it into the last release of the Photon v5.6.0 SDKs for DotNet, Unity3d and Silverlight. These clients did not send empty arrays correctly and they did not deserialize double values as intended. Both are fixed in the v5.6.1 now available.
04
Dec 09
It took longer than expected. So much is true. But looking back (and at the release history file) I realize there is a lot of new stuff in v1.6.1. Some big changes and lots of minor updates and fixes.
The major change for the new SDKs is the switch to a new protocol: We support float and double and anything can be sent as array now (aside from hashtable or array itself)! Send float-arrays if you like an need the precision.
We also have UDP channel prioritization. The lower channels are put into packages first and this makes sure they get through earlier. Less time-critical data can be sent in “higher” channels and won’t defer movement updates.
If the server disconnects a client, it will give a reason: timeout, “by logic” or “by server concurrent user limit”. You could show the user that the server is busy now.
Two especially tricky issues were found and fixed. One was a reference counting issue which produced exceptions and the other was a memleak in certain situations. But we also worked on the Photon Control and made it better compatible with Win7. It requires admin rights now but otherwise we would need admin rights per action.
On the client side we have updates for: Win32, iPhone, Unity3D, DotNet and Silverlight and they contain many smaller improvements each. Especially the native SDKs (C, C++, objC) are evolved.
While the server side is compatible with the older SDKs (e.g. Flash and Java), of course they can’t be used with the new data-types until updated. So far, the prio for this is low, however. Let us know if you are interested in them.
12
Nov 09
Today is the release of the long awaited Flash Client SDK for Photon. The AS3 API allows you to connect to the regular Photon server and through this you can also connect to clients on other supported platforms.
Build entire realtime multiplayer games in Flash or enhance the community site of your games with a client that displays in-game information.
To ensure low traffic, TCP binary sockets are used in combination with AMF3 encoding. This supports all AS3 datatypes. The Photon Server SDK supplies you with a “policy application”, which provides the necessary policy file for cross-domain connections (swf not hosted on the same server it connects to).
Flash incurs two limitations: It supports only TCP sockets, so UDP is unavailable. The second limit applies only to cross-platform games and means you should only use AS3 datatypes, even if other platforms support more datatypes natively.
To all Flash developers: download and feel free to give feedback.
