We refactored the C++ and objC  demos to use the same code on every platform (except UI), so that we can keep the demos on many platforms up to date at a high quality level more easily. This triggers the following immediate changes:

iOS: 2 new C++ demos – the hello world one, known from the marmalade sdk, which is optimized to be an as easy as possible entry point into using Photon and a C++ version of the graphical realtime-demo, based on cocos2d-x (still also shipping the directly openGL ES based objc version in addition)
Marmalade: 1 new C++ demo – finally the Marmalade SDK also comes with a version of the graphical realtime demo
Win32: 1 new C++ demo: the hello-world one; and the C++ realtime demo now ships with a new graphics engine and a new look

Last but not least the most shining news of this release of course is, that finally we officially support OS X as client platform

Get the new native Photon 3 Client SDKs here.

We already announced the $9/month subscription fee for the Photon Cloud 100 indie account and we decided to offer two more flavours namely Photon Cloud 500 and Photon Cloud 1,000 which we priced really, really tight as well. You guessed it: the numbers 100, 500, 1k are according to the concurrent user limit. You need more than 1,000 concurrent users? No problem, just upgrade your account with additional Photon Cloud subscriptions.

All Photon Cloud accounts include support, plenty of message traffic and both Photon Cloud 500 & 1,000 come with a flexible concurrent user limit, which we call ‘CCU Burst’. It means that we will not block any user from your app even in case your concurrent user limit is exceeded. Instead you are notified and you can decide within 24h if you like to upgrade your Photon Cloud account.

You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your Photon Cloud account at any time.

The pricing becomes effective in February 2012, so if you have a free Photon Cloud account it will remain free until 31st of January, 2012.

No free Photon Cloud account yet? Create one at www.exitgamescloud.com

Photon Cloud Pricing - Feedback Strictly Wanted

Photon Cloud Pricing - Feedback Strictly Wanted

• operation requests are now wrapped up into classes like operation responses and events
• LitePeer’s opRaiseEvent() now supports event caching and receiver groups
• as always there have been some minor bugfixes

However there are great news for the objC coders among you: the iOS version of the new SDK is the first client SDK to offer a high-level API for the Photon 3 LoadBalancing features! This new API layer simplifies usage of multiple game servers as used in our cloud service exitgamescloud.com.

Of course, it’s fully compatible with the “Loadbalancing” applications found in our server SDK, so you can host this yourself as well. This is implemented as objC library and the source is available in the SDK.

A C++ version of this LoadBalancing library is currently in development and will come soon  for all native client SDKs.

Get the new Photon 3 Client SDKs here.

Vote for Photon 3

We are excited to announce that Photon 3 has been nominated as finalist in the Networking category for this year’s Front Line Awards by Game Developer.

Voting closes November 18th, so there are only a few days left to cast your vote for Photon.