Beamable August 2023 Release Review

Beamable August 2023 Release Review

In August 2003, Beamable released SDK versions 1.17.1, 1.17.2, 1.17.3, and 1.18.0. Here are the highlights from those releases. 

Command Line Interface (CLI)

We’ve spent a lot of effort this month focusing on making the CLI tooling easier to use. In the latest versions of Beamable, the CLI has several usability improvements.

  • When you use the beam project new command, the new project will use the latest version of the Beamable SDK.
  • Additionally, the correct version of the Beamable Templates are automatically installed.
  • The CLI –log switch has been fixed.
  • Many of the various beam project commands are more forgiving in their error cases, and prompt for corrective measures in error cases.
  • Services have better default settings to streamline development.
  • Archived realms are no longer shown when logging into the CLI. 
  • The CLI can also be used to manage Beamable Content.
  • In Beamable 1.18.0, the CLI can manage all Beamable Content namespaces without needing to switch between them. 

Microservice Improvements

Throughout the latest patches and releases of Beamable, Standalone Microservices have seen a few critical improvements.

  • Standalone Microservices taking advantage of the federated identity or inventory features can now interoperate with Unity.
  • Beamable Content defined in the Standalone Microservice’s common project is now usable from a linked Unity project.
  • Additionally, developers using Apple Silicon, or other ARM-based CPU architectures, can now deploy their Standalone Microservices successfully. 

There are a handful of other bug fixes and workflow improvements for Microservices in general.

  • Log output will appear with fewer escaped JSON characters, which will make it easier for developers to leverage service logs.
  • Generated client code for Microservices will use the object serialization technique instead of array serialization technique. 

Beamable 1.18.0 also includes a new IUsageAPI service accessed via Dependency Injection. The IUsageAPI exposes CPU and Memory usage statistics and a unique identifier for each service instance. 

Unity SDK

In Beamable 1.18.0, the BeamContext game object is the last thing to be disposed of when a Beam Context is being shutdown. Previously, there was a large swatch of bugs that would appear when exiting playmode, or using the .Stop() function on a Beam Context. The IBeamableDisposableOrder interface allows any registered Beamable dependency to declare a custom disposal priority. By default, the Beam Context uses a disposal priority to ensure it is handled last. This means that as other components of the Beamable SDK are shutting down, they have access to critical services available on the Beam Context

Change Logs

For the official changelogs, please visit https://beamable.github.io/changes