Beamable February 2023 SDK Release Review

In February, Beamable released SDK versions 1.11.0, and 1.11.1. Here are the highlights from the previous month of releases. 

Our changelogs can be found at https://beamable.github.io/changes

Federated Authentication and Inventory

In Beamable 1.11.0, you can add support for arbitrary external authentication, and manage Inventory state through arbitrary external third parties. Our documentation explains in more detail, but in short, you can use a Beamable Microservice to manage the secure interchange between Beamable authentication and whatever external authentication you need. Federated authentication could be used to integrate with Auth0, custom authentication solutions, or even blockchains. Federated inventory allows you to run custom logic on a Microservice anytime a player’s inventory would be modified, and act as the source of truth for the inventory state. The Federation of inventory enables you to manage a player’s inventory on a blockchain or back it up to a third-party source.

Presence SDK

Beamable 1.11.0 delivers a new Presence API and SDK that allows players to manage their online status. The documentation describes how to manage player presence. Any player can set their status to “invisible”, “do not disturb”, “away”, or “online”. Additionally, the presence update can include a free-text string to describe something unique about the status, such as “Playing level 4”, or “Sitting in the Lobby”. A player can view their friends’ presence status, and receive programmatic updates when the status changes.   

SDK Enhancements and Bug fixes

In Beamable 1.11.0, the Player Inventory SDK received a few bug fixes, as well new methods to make managing inventory easier. There is a new method called UpdateDelayed that will enqueue inventory updates for a player and then send them in batch. For example, instead of sending 3 separate update requests in a short time span, the new method will wait for a short period of time, collect all the updates, combine them into 1 request, and then send the single request. This will help you manage your inventory API call volume. 

Previously, in order to start using Beamable in code, you had to use code similar to the following, 

ar ctx = BeamContext.Default;await ctx.OnReady;

In Beamable 1.11.0, there is a new shortcut to get the BeamContext and await it all in one line, 

var ctx = await BeamContext.Default.Instance;

Change Logs

Beamable 1.11.0 and 1.11.1 also include a variety of bug fixes that you can review in our changelogs.