v0.86.0 Room For One More

This one is about the two moments where a multiplayer game meets other people: the server you left running somewhere, and the friend who could not get in.

Your server says who is playing it

A dedicated server hosted on Floptle Cloud now reports its player count, how long it has been up, how fast it is ticking, and — the one that matters — the six-character code people join with. Before this, a server could run all day while its page showed no players and no code to give anybody, which is a strange thing to see about a game that is working.

The server had nowhere it was allowed to write. It runs locked down, as a user of its own with no access to anything it was not handed, and the file it was asked to write its status into belonged to somebody else. It gets a place of its own now.

Nothing to do. Deployments pick this up when the region is updated.

A bundle arrives with all of its files

If a file in your project was readable only by you — which is what some machines do to every file you create — it arrived on the server unreadable, and the server ran without it. Not an error, no failed deployment: a game quietly missing its input bindings, or four of its scripts, and playing on regardless.

Every file in a server bundle is now readable wherever it lands. The export writes them that way, and a server unpacking a bundle makes sure of it — so this is fixed for bundles you have already uploaded, not only for the next one.

Two more things in the same area:

• A build that cannot start now stops trying. It settles as failed, with the reason, instead of restarting forever.
• Exporting a server bundle from a beta engine is refused, with the reason. Floptle Cloud runs stable engine versions, so a bundle pinned to a beta could never have started. The export says so before it writes anything, rather than leaving you to find out from a deployment that will not come up.

A game that fills up is good news

Two different people see a full game, and until now they got the same sentence — the developer's one, which named the game, the number, the plan and a price page.

The person trying to join is your friend holding a lobby code. They cannot buy anything and it is not their problem, so they now read:

This game is full right now. Try again in a minute.

You hear it once — not once per person turned away — with the number, the fact that nobody already playing was disconnected, and where to raise it. It reaches the editor console, a dedicated server's output, and your own game through net.notice(), so you can put it on your lobby screen for the people it actually concerns.

Nobody is charged for reaching the ceiling, nothing is throttled, and nobody playing is ever dropped for it.

Your game key lives in the editor

Project settings ⏵ Networked ⏵ Game key is where a Floptle Cloud game key goes. There is a Game name beside it, a link to manage that game or register a new one, and no .ron file to edit by hand.

Hosting with relay = "cloud" and no key now says so before anything touches the network, and names where to get one. It used to look like a connection problem — which was a poor thing to see on a plane, behind a firewall, or in a headless test, about a project that was simply never connected. It also says plainly that hosting on your own machine, or your own relay, needs no key at all.

If you run your own relay, its periodic line now includes how much traffic it has carried, so the figure you see is one you can check against the machine.

Documentation

• Shipping a server bundle is written down, in export-builds.md: the one command, what is left out of a bundle and why, which scene a server actually boots into, and the two things a game needs before it runs well on a box you do not sit at.
• The multiplayer tutorial ends by letting a friend join from their machine, which is the step that makes it a multiplayer game.
• The command line now describes itself to the website, so the page listing every verb — and whether each one needs a graphics card or writes into your project — is generated from the engine instead of kept in step by hand.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. Open your project and it works.