Company Photon Neutron Developer Blog Shop

September, 2009

28
Sep 09

We just released a new Photon Server SDK v1.6.0 and the first two Client SDKs. Look out for these goodies:

Low-level, we added fragmentation for bigger data chunks and channels to organize operation sequencing. High-level, we added properties to rooms and players: Photon can now remember arbitrary data about players or games. Never again players need to update joining newcomers about the running map or other stats. Simply set and check properties.

Photon Control makes an appearance in the server SDK. Forget the .cmd-files and console-style starting of Photon! Run PhotonControl.exe and check out your windows tray. If you like it, make it autostart. On Vista and Windows 7, this tool might need to be elevated, to get the list of processes running.

And we are not done yet: Silverlight has it’s own Client SDK now, too. The “Policy” application in the Server SDK makes sure that the client gets access to your server.

Try it. The trial is refreshed, too!

24
Sep 09

Photon Control

Tobias — Development / Highlight — Comments Off

The time of Photon’s cmd-files is coming to an end. Finally!

Photon Control menu

Photon Control menu

I have been spending the better part of two days for a small tray application that spies on Photon and gives you control over it. Aside from start, stop, install and remove of service and counters, Photon Control also reads the license info from the log. It shows if Photon is running and you can easily open an explorer in it’s working directory. The app can be set to autostart, so you have the Photon-running icon when you login to your server.

This app might save some time, so it’s part of Photon Server SDK v1.6.0.

Still: so many ideas floating around!

17
Sep 09

Photon Fragments

Tobias — Development / Highlight — Comments Off

We have been working on several new features for Photon over the last weeks and it’s about time to mention them here.

First of all, there will be fragmentation support. This means you can finally send more than 1KB as you data will be stretched over several packets if needed. You don’t have to care about this.

Channels are also new. They provide separate sequences for your sent data and have implicit prioritization: Your movement updates in channel 0 could be handled independently of the reassembly of bigger chunks in channel 1.

The Lite application will have several changes as well. We provide a simple Property system for games and players which becomes part of the client API as well. Events are now built with the help of Attributes and Reflection, just like Operations the values are auto-filled.

We are looking forward to your feedback.

17
Sep 09

The last post was about the Unity iPhone plugin 1.5.0, which crashes with the Neutron library (Photon / UDP is not affected). That bug is nailed and Unity will fix it in their next update.

Meanwhile you can use a simple workaround: by inserting “private WWW www;” into your own scripts, the WWW class cannot be stripped and all is fine.

01
Sep 09

Unity3D iPhone Woes

Tobias — Development — Comments Off

Unity3D got an update for iPhone development: v1.5 boosts speed improvements on all fronts and is generally in excellent shape.

Sad but true, there is an incompatibility between our Neutron (HTTP) library and Unity3D. We reported this as bug and look forward to a fix from Team Unity. Photon (UDP) is not affected.

We will post news as soon as a fix is found.