Release Notes - 2023

2023-51 (Dec 18, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-51 delivers a number of defect fixes across both our Unreal and Unity plugins, as well as the Reality platform SDK:

• Fixed an issue in the Unreal plugin where mouse coordinates in the client were offset from the in game coordinates. This offset issue is specifically triggered by resizing the browser. The updated Unreal plugin can be downloaded here. To upgrade, we recommend fully deleting the PureWeb plugin from your Unreal project and then installing the new plugin following the preparation instructions.
• We discovered that our most recent Unity plugin was causing syntax errors in older sub-versions of Unity 2021 LTS. These syntax errors have been addressed, and the new version of the Unity plugin can be found here.
• Addressed an issue where Chrome browsers running on Android would fail to correctly negotiate a stream to Unreal models. This fix can be found in version 4.5.0 of our platform SDK, which can be downloaded from NPM here. The instructions on how to update your client to this new SDK can be found on our developer hub.  Preview.pureweb.io has also been updated to this version of the SDK.

Please feel free to reach out through our support page or discord channel if you have any questions about this release.

2023-50 (Dec 11, 2023)

Summary
2023-50 is a rollback release. Specifically, we are rolling the Nvidia driver in our AWS-based on-demand environments back from version 535.25 to 511.65.

In the last couple of weeks, we’d started to receive reports of unusually low framerates in our AWS on-demand environment for certain models. Upon investigation we were able to isolate the issue to the recently updated Nvidia driver.

The original Nvidia driver upgrade was thoroughly tested with numerous Unreal and Unity models on all our environments. Despite this, the framerate issue never appeared in our QA process, leading us to hypothesize that the issue is specific to certain models.

Following the roll back, framerates on the impacted models have returned to normal.

Please note, the Nvidia driver on our dedicated and CoreWeave based on-demand environments was not reverted, and is still set at 535.25.

2023-49 (Dec 7, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-49 delivers a brand new Unity plugin (v3.0.7) and accompanying client SDK (v4.4.0).
The changes in this plugin are focused on updating the versions of the internal Unity libraries our plugin relies on. Specifically the WebRTC framework has been upgraded from 2.3.3-preview, to 3.0.0-pre.7, and the Input System has been upgraded from 1.3.0 to 1.6.1.

The key benefit in upgrading the WebRTC library is that the plugin is now able to take advantage of hardware video encoding, resulting in significantly improved streaming framerate and video quality.

Accompanying the Unity plugin is an update to our client SDK, which includes the client side changes tied to the hardware encoder. This version of the SDK also addresses an issue where client touch input event coordinates were offset from their intended source targets.

How to upgrade:

The new Unity plugin can be downloaded here:
https://pureweb-na.s3.amazonaws.com/nightlies/PixelStreaming/com.pureweb.platform-3.0.7.tgz

To upgrade your Unity plugin we recommend completely deleting the existing PureWeb plugin from your Unity project, including the associated PureWebStreaming game object, and install the new plugin by following the steps here: https://developer.pureweb.io/prepare-your-unity-project/

The new SDK can be found on NPM, here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pureweb/platform-sdk

To update the version of the SDK in your custom client, follow the steps here: https://developer.pureweb.io/update-webclient-sdk/

If you’re currently using the preview client at preview.pureweb.io, the SDK included in that client was updated as part of this release.

Additional technical notes:

• In order to take advantage of the new Unity plugin, you must upgrade to at least version v4.4.0 of our client SDK. However, the client changes are backwards compatible, so if you upgrade to v4.4.0 of the client SDK or later, it is not mandatory to upgrade your Unity plugin.
• Firefox does not implement the setCodecPreferences() API. Therefore, it is not possible for our SDK to specify that the hardware encoder should always be used. Firefox will instead set its own encoder preferences. In our testing, we’ve found that Firefox will almost always connect using the software encoder. If this API becomes available in Firefox in the future, we will make the appropriate changes to use hardware encoding, but for now, Firefox users will not enjoy the same video quality and framerate improvements as users of other browsers.
• The changes made in this SDK have broken compatibility for older, long unsupported versions of Unreal engine. Specifically, Unreal models built on version 5.0 or 4.26 and earlier are not compatible with v4.4.0 of the PureWeb client SDK. This upgraded SDK is fully compatible with all currently supported versions of both Unreal Engine and Unity Engine.

If you have any questions about this update, or you run into issues, please reach out to your dedicated Customer Success rep, or contact support@pureweb.com.
Happy Streaming!

2023-48 (Nov 28, 2023)

Summary

Release 48 is an internal release focused on security and stability improvements. Users should not see any visible impact from this release.

2023-47 (Nov 23, 2023)

Summary

Release 47 was a routine update of the core platform logic focused primarily focused on updating 3rd party dependencies in our platform service mesh and addressing defects identified in as part of our regular security validation processes. These changes should be transparent to end users.

2023-46 (Nov 17, 2023)

Summary

Release 46 was a routine internal update to improve observability and debuggability of our CoreWeave based on-demand providers.

2023-45 (Nov 17, 2023)

Summary

Release 45 fixes an issue in our AWS based on-demand providers where certain customer models would crash due to memory management irregularities in the models.

2023-44 (Nov 8, 2023)

Summary

Today we released version 4.3.0 of our SDK packages. This version introduces the ability to configure the PureWeb streaming agent using a configuration file. For more information about the PureWeb streaming agent, please see our documentation for the local development workflow. This improvement is a pre-requisite for a collection of updates we’ll be rolling out over the next several days which will significantly improve the launch speed performance of models running on our dedicated providers (more on this soon). The updated streaming agent can be downloaded from NPM at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pureweb/platform-streaming-agent

Below are additional details on how to make use of the new configuration workflow: To utilize the configuration file, either:

• Provide the --configFile="<full_path_name>" command line argument, or
• Set the PUREWEB_CONFIGURATION_FILE environment variable.

Attributes for the Streaming Agent can be provided in multiple ways: command line parameters, environment variables, or the configuration file. Their priority is as follows:

1. Command Line
2. Environment Variable
3. Configuration File

For instance, if the agentToken parameter is specified via command line and environment variable but also exists in the configuration file, the command line or environment variable value will take precedence.
The configuration file should be in JSON format and can contain any set of attributes. Here's a sample configuration:

{
 "streamerPort": 8080,
 "sidecarPort": 8081,
 "leaseUrl": "https://example.com/lease",
 "agentToken": "myToken",
 "shutdownOnDisconnect": true,
 "logLevel": "debug",
 "lingerTimeoutSeconds": 30,
 "rendezvousTimeoutSeconds": 60,
 "reconnectTimeoutMilliseconds": 5000,
 "ueVersion": "1.0.0",
 "connectionTimeout": 10000
}

2023-43 (Nov 7, 2023)

Summary

Today we’re excited to announce that PureWeb Reality officially supports Unreal engine 5.3. As with all new Unreal versions, there is a new version of the Unreal plugin, which can be found here. We’ve validated compatibility across both our dedicated and on-demand providers. Per our deprecation policy, Unreal 5.1 is now fully deprecated, and Unreal 5.2 will only receive platform support. We continue to provide full support for Unreal 4.27.

If you’re upgrading an existing Unreal project, you’ll need to completely remove the 5.2 version of the PureWeb plugin from your project, and replace it with the 5.3 version.

If you’re just getting started with streaming Unreal engine on PureWeb, you can refer to the getting started guide here.

Please reach out if you have any questions, and happy streaming!

2023-42 (Nov 6, 2023)

Summary

Release 42 introduces a change to the new user workflow. Previously, it was possible for new users to sign up and start uploading models without any indication of how to contact our Sales & Customer Success teams to have their accounts enabled for streaming. This release changes the new user workflow with new feedback and guards to prevent the user from ‘dead-ending’ in the signup process without any indication of what to do next to finish their onboarding. Please note, there were no release notes for 2023-41, as this release was focused on internal operational improvements.

2023-40 (Oct 23, 2023)

Summary

Reality release 2023-40 introduces an improvement to how the platform processes model availability data. Previously, it was possible for the availability flag on the model card to display inaccurate information. This fix should improve the accuracy and timeliness of this information.

2023-39 (Oct 17, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-39 is primarily focused on fixes to the PureWeb console. Specifically, the following issues were addressed in this release:

• Model deletion workflow now provides clearer feedback while the deletion is processing
• Fixed an issue where uploading a new model would occasionally display the thumbnail from a different model.
• We’ve modified the console account creation workflow. Previously, when confirming a new account, you would receive an email with a link you needed to click. We discovered that a long standing issue in Microsoft Outlook blocked this workflow for some users. Now, new users will receive a confirmation code, instead of a link.
• We’ve adjusted the latency threshold of the hybrid routing system. Now, dedicated capacity will be preferred if it is within 30ms of the nearest on-demand capacity, beyond that, on-demand capacity will still be preferred. Previously this threshold was 20ms.

2023-38 (Oct 10, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-38, mirrors release 37, but this time for our CoreWeave-based providers. Including:

• Host OS and 3rd party library security patches and dependency updates
• Update for the Nvidia driver, bringing it up to 536.25 across all environments
• Updates to our endpoint security system in CoreWeave
• Stability improvements to the CoreWeave server provisioning process, which translates into more consistent up-time

2023-37 (Oct 4, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-37 was a routine update of dependencies and packages across all our AWS-based providers to incorporate the latest security packages from 3rd party vendors. In addition we have updated the Nvidia GPU driver in these environments to 536.25. A similar update to our CoreWeave providers will be coming down the pipe in the next week or so.

Happy Streaming!

2023-36 (Sep 25, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-36 includes a suite of stability improvements targeted at reducing risk associated with our update and maintenance process, and security improvements targeted at our platform network perimeter.  These changes should be entirely transparent to end-users.

Happy Streaming!

2023-35 (Sep 7, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-35 rolled out bug fixes and operational stability in our core packages of SDK.
In response to the bug fixes and to maintain compatibility with other dependency packages, we have downgraded our Apollo Client to v2.

Happy Streaming!

2023-34 (Aug 24, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-34 rolled out another large batch of security improvements in our CoreWeave on-demand providers. This includes a new real-time security monitoring system and a host of dependency updates and patches.

Additionally, the storage stability improvements we rolled out in 2023-31 have had the desired impact, as such we've been able to expand the pools within our CoreWeave on-demand provider.

As of today, the single pool that was previously operating in Illinois, has been replaced with two pools, one in Nevada, and the other in New York. We hope that this will offer better low-latency provider options for all our users.

Happy Streaming!

2023-33 (Aug 18, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-33 rolls out a significant CPU performance boost to our CoreWeave on-demand provider. Our team has recently spent time benchmarking the relative streaming performance of our CoreWeave on-demand provider against our AWS on-demand provider, and we have found that Unreal and Unity models running on CoreWeave were running into CPU constraints more often than in our AWS providers.

To address this difference, today, we’ve increased the vCPU allocation in or CoreWeave on-demand provider by 50% from 4 vCPUs, to 6. Beyond increasing the streaming performance of models running on CoreWeave, this also creates a more consistent streaming experience when running in a hybrid configuration with either our AWS on-demand, or our dedicated providers.

As we feel that this change brings CoreWeave CPU performance up-to-par with our existing AWS performance, this improvement in our infrastructure will come at no additional cost to you in terms of your usage pricing.

Happy Streaming!

2023-32 (Aug 17, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-32 delivers significant stability improvements to our CoreWeave based on-demand providers:

• Over the last few months we’ve been tracking a persistent rate of errors from the underlying storage infrastructure in CoreWeave. As part of this release we have re-engineered the storage access system to be significantly more resilient when encountering these instabilities.
• This release also includes a number of routine patches and security update to 3rd party software throughout the provider.

2023-31 (Aug 2, 2023)

Summary

This release brings operational stability and security fixes in CoreWeave Infrastructure.

Release 2023-31 upgrades various out of date packages in CoreWeave Virtual Server identified by our automated and continuous vulnerability software. The release also removes the NodeJS package from the CoreWeave Virtual Server.

2023-30 (July 31, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-30 fixes critical security fixes identified by our code analysis and scanning tool Snyk.

The fixes brings operational and security stability by upgrading the base OS image to the latest version.

2023-29 (July 24, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-29 re-introduces support for native touch events in Unreal engine 5.2.  With the release of 5.2, the native touch event system was updated in a way that broke compatibility with our SDK. We didn’t want to slow the adoption of Unreal 5.2 models on our platform while we updated to support these changes.

As of version 4.2.0 our SDK supports native touch events (i.e. mobile gestures) for all supported versions of Unreal engine. To use native touch events in your custom client just add "useNativeTouchEvents": true to your client.json file.

You can get version 4.2.0 of the PureWeb SDK here.

2023-28 (July 24, 2023)

Summary

Release 28 was a comprehensive security update to all of the VM dependencies on all of our dedicated providers. Users of our dedicated providers should not see any changes in their streaming experience.

2023-27 (July 18, 2023)

Summary

Release 27 was another security focused release, focused on improving the security and observability of our platform network perimeter.

2023-26 (July 12, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-26 is focused exclusively on security and observability improvements, as well as numerous upstream 3rd party dependency updates in the core platform driven by our goal being ready for our SOC 2 audit later this month.

2023-25 (June 30, 2023)

Summary

Today we released an update to the PureWeb Reality SDK (v.4.1.0).  This update includes:

• Fixed a mismatch between the versions of the SDK and the Reality React client template which was causing template build failures.

Cleaned up inaccurate error logs that were showing up in the browser console as a result of changes made in Unreal 5.2.  Specifically:

• unrecognized data received, packed ID 255
• unrecognized data received, packed ID 12
• Published a refresh of the SDK API documentation.

2023-24 (June 29, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-24 was an update to the core platform centered primarily around addressing user-reported defects:

• Fixed an issue where if a model was uploaded, in some cases the upload would succeed, but fail to register in the console. There would then be no way of deleting this model.
• Fixed a related issue where it was possible to put an the model information in an inconsistent state by rapidly deleting a model, then swapping model versions.
• Fixed a defect where a change in the Google SSO login workflow was failing for newly signed up users.
• Improved the resiliency of the system that manages platform connections to all regional streaming providers. This has improved the liveliness of model availability information in the console.
• Finally, this release included a handful of additional security updates and improvements as we continue to push towards our SOC 2 goal.

2023-23 (June 7, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-23 is focused on a range of internal monitoring and observability improvements on sub-set of our on-demand streaming providers. As discussed in previous releases, our team is focused on working towards our first successful SOC2 audit. The changes in this release work towards addressing the observability and logging requirements set out in the SOC2 common criteria.

2023-22 (June 1, 2023)

Summary

This is a small release with only one user facing change:

• Fixed a defect in the preview client where a URL that included an invalid version ID would cause the preview client to silently fail.  Now the preview client will present an error indicating that the model ID and Version is invalid.

2023-21 (May 26, 2023)

Summary

Today we’re releasing an update to our platform and Unreal Plugin that introduces compatibility for Unreal Engine 5.2.

There are no significant incompatibilities or breaking changes in this release. In order to upgrade your Unreal 5.1 project to 5.2, you’ll have to remove the 5.1 version of the PureWeb Plugin, and replace it with the 5.2 version.

The 5.2 version of the PureWeb plugin can be downloaded here.

Version Support

With the addition of support for Unreal 5.2, we are adjusting our support matrix per our Deprecation Policy:

• UE 5.0 is no longer supported (deprecated)
• UE 5.1 is platform supported only
• UE 4.27 continues to be receive both platform & SDK support

2023-20 (May 16, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-20 updates the PureWeb platform SDK and client template to version 4.0.1. This version includes fixes for the following two defects:

• Fixes an incompatibility that was preventing the CRA template from running on MacOS and Linux devices.
• Addressed a series of warnings that was being produced by the CRA template regarding a failure to parse source maps.

As this is a point release, it is fully compatible with all clients built with the 4.0.0 SDK. The new SDK and template can be downloaded on NPM.

2023-19 (May 11, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-19 sees two small updates in the core platform:

• Addressed an issue where in exceptionally rare circumstances certain customer models wouldn’t work in our on-demand environment.  This was due to the random model ID including a reserved substring of characters.
• Added a link to the new status.pureweb.io page from the PureWeb Console and Resource Hub.

2023-18 (May 3, 2023)

Summary

Today’s release (2023-18) sees a major improvement in global coverage for our On-demand offering. Based on feedback from customers and observations of global data, today we’ve added a new On-demand pool in India!

Any customers currently using the On-demand providers will begin taking advantage of this new pool immediately, automatically and at no extra charge. As always, our global routing system will take into account end-user latency to all our various providers, and users closest to this new Indian provider will be automatically routed there. This will result in improved framerates and interactive latencies for all users in the region.

2023-17 (May 1, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-17 delivers a major improvement to our ability communicate to users about the status, uptime, and maintenance of the Reality platform. Additionally, this release fixed a number of stability issues in our On Demand providers.

Status Page

Today we launched status.pureweb.io. This site will allow users to monitor PureWeb system uptime at a both a component and geographical level. Additionally, disruptions to any of our critical 3rd party dependencies will be rolled up into our overall system status.

Thanks to system improvements over the last year, it’s rare that we have to block planned downtime for system updates. However, going forward, if such a planned maintenance window is needed, we will be using the status page to document these windows.

The system also provides mechanisms to be automatically notified by email, text, slack or webhook, about incidents, planned outages, or changes in system status.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a storage leak in the On-demand provider that was resulting in scattered cases of disk exhaustion. This was manifesting to users as inconsistently failing to get a streaming session.
• Fixed a cluster of issues that were resulting in instances being taken out of service when they shouldn’t be. While rare, this could have resulted in slightly longer wait times for users on some on-demand providers where instance removal was causing capacity exhaustion.

2023-16 (Apr 18, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-16 was an update to our core platform control plane focused on improving the scalability and resiliency of the messaging system that processes model updates from all virtualization providers around the globe (i.e. which models are available, with what capacity, etc.).

From the user’s point of view, the changes made in this release will improve the speed and consistency with which newly uploaded models become ‘available’.

2023-15 (Apr 12, 2023)

Summary

Today’s release saw a fairly large update to the primary control plane of the PureWeb Reality platform. While most of the changes are transparent to end-users, we’ve made a number of security and observability improvements in-line with our goal of archiving a clean SOC 2 audit in the coming months. This includes things like significantly increasing the scope and actionability of our logging system, as well as building out a wide range of health probes to alert us to issues long before they have a chance to impact platform performance and availability.

Along with these under-the-hood updates, a number of small user-facing improvements were released including:

• Preview client now includes a direct link to our developer hub documentation on how to configure your projects for optimal resizing behavior. This link will remain until resizing behavior across our supported Unreal versions is consistent.
• Updated settings on our global routing system in response to system monitoring and customer feedback indicating that we occasionally routing users further afield than strictly necessary in order to minimize wait time in queue.
• Fixed a handful of CSS issues with for error messages and modals.

2023-14 (Mar 28, 2023)

Summary

Today we release a fairly large, but largely transparent change to our on-demand providers. This change is exclusively an operational improvement that will allow us to deploy future updates to this system without taking it offline.

Previously, updating parts of this system would require us to take each regional on-demand provider offline in a rolling fashion in order to perform updates. While these updates were typically quick, it meant that during the update window, users would be at risk of experiencing sub-optimal routing and a degraded streaming experience. We’re planning out some significant improvements to our on-demand providers throughout this year, and this release means faster, zero downtime updates, which will move us towards our goal of creating the best possible on-demand experience possible.

2023-13 (Mar 24, 2023)

Summary

Today we are releasing version 4.0 of the Reality Platform SDK. While the core APIs and functionality remain largely the same, we’ve updated all of the internal upstream dependencies. The goal of this was to get to the point where running npm audit --production on the SDK packages would return zero vulnerable packages. Additionally, as part of this upgrade process, we’ve also updated our NodeJS support to the current LTS version (v18.x).

Given the changes in the underlying dependencies, the 4.0 SDK is not backwards compatible with previous versions of the SDK. If you use our client template to bootstrap a new client from scratch, the 4.0 SDK will be automatically included. However, if you want to upgrade an existing client from the 3.x to 4.0, we’ve created a step-by-step article on our developer hub describing the upgrade process.

Unreal Resize Support

With the release of Unreal Engine 5.1.1, Epic has fixed the automatic resizing functionality of Pixel Streaming. Meaning that once again, the source game viewport will automatically resize to match the dimensions of the user’s browser. This has great benefits for running on mobile devices, and in general results in overall better performance and higher levels of visual fidelity. The new 4.0 version of the Reality Platform SDK supports this revived resizing functionality by default.

However, resizing in UE 5.0.x and 5.1.0 remain broken, resulting in frequent game crashes when resizing. For this reason we recommend updating to the latest version of Unreal Engine. If this is not possible, you can turn off resizing by adding the `UE_VERSION=5.0` environment variable to your model (even if it’s 5.1.0). For more information on this change, please see our developer hub article on the topic.

2023-12 (Mar 16, 2023)

Summary

Today’s release (2023-12), is a small update to our platform SDK which addresses two known defects:

• Addressed an issue where non-North American users where occasionally experiencing unexpected session disconnections.  You may recall that the earlier parts of this fix were rolled out in 2023-4 and 2023-6.  After extensive testing of this updated SDK, we are confident that we’ve significantly improved the situation.  We will continue to monitor connection stability to see if further changes are required.
• Fixed an issue the local development workflow (as documented here), was no longer working correctly following the change to revokable URLs in 2023-3.

The new SDK version 3.24.3 is ready for download from NPM today.

2023-11 (Mar 13, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-11 is principally a defect fix to a small sub-set of our on-demand providers.  For certain providers we found that if a model was rapidly published and unpublished, it could end up in an inconsistent state where the platform would believe the model was published when it wasn’t, or vice versa.  This is an edge case, and based on our investigation of system logs, we believe it only impacted a single customer model.

Along with this defect fix, we also made internal observability improvements to our on-demand providers making it easier to proactively identify issues going forward.

2023-10 (Feb 28, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-10 is focused on availability and performance improvements for our dedicated streaming providers around the world.

First, we’ve overhauled the scheduling system for our dedicated providers to be far more performant under intense load.  Previously we found issues where heavy load would cause launch requests to stay in queue far longer than was strictly necessary due to issues arising from parallelized scheduling operations.  With these changes users will no longer experience unnecessary delays due to scheduling operations.

Second, we’ve rolled out a set of changes to our dedicated providers that will allow us to more easily monitor virtual servers and alert us to unplanned changes in instance health.  Availability issues stemming from server health are rare, but we want ensure we can identify these changes before they become issues so they can be addressed without impacting the streaming experience.

2023-09 (Feb 24, 2023)

Summary

2023-9 is focused almost exclusively on internal system cleanup. There will be some minor performance improvements as we removed a large amount of code that has been deprecated as a result of the improvements and new feature releases over the last year. This release also includes our new logo throughout the console experience, to be consistent with our new website that is soon to be launching at pureweb.com.

2023-08 (Feb 16, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-8 delivers the following improvements to the platform:

• Improved our global routing system to be more resilient in the face of whole region outages in our underlying cloud infrastructure providers. We are now able to better detect when a region is offline and automatically route around these outages.
• Improved the user interface for model sharing. Specifically, there is now an option to easily remove the authentication token for your model. You can learn more about share URLs and access tokens here, but to briefly summarize:

If your project is configured to ‘Allow Unrestricted Access’, then when sharing a model, you will have the option to include an access token which will automatically expire after 7 days. This token is not mandatory, and if removed, your share link will not expire.

If your project is configured to not ‘Allow Unrestricted Access’, then when sharing a model, an access token is automatically and necessarily included in the share link, otherwise there is no way to share access to a private model. However, similar to the above scenario, the token will expire in 7 days. You can invalidate the share link sooner than using the link invalidation button. If you want to establish a more permanent way of accessing a private model, we recommend creating a dedicated authentication access mechanism. You can see an example of how to do this here.

Additionally, this release fixes the following defects:

• Addressed an issue where in higher traffic situations (several hundred to thousands of streaming sessions being launched in < 5 minutes), some sessions would fail to connect to the platform to initiate a stream.
• Fixed a defect where uploading a model with the CLI would unintentionally invalidate and replace the current preview link secure hash.
• Fixed a defect where changing the runtime customizations for your model (environment variables and command line arguments) would invalidate the preview link secure hash.

2023-07 (Feb 9, 2023)

Summary

Today marks the General Availability of our new CoreWeave on-demand providers!

We’ve always known that in order to maximize the reach of real-time streaming technologies we have to maximize the capacity and geographical distribution of GPU compute that we have access to. CoreWeave, given its specialization in cloud GPU compute, was always a natural fit. We want to thank all of our partners and customers who joined our beta program and provided feedback. Your input was invaluable in shaping the offering released today.

Over the course of the next week, our customer success team will begin reaching out to our existing on-demand customers to facilitate the addition of this new provider type to their projects. You won’t have to do anything on your side, and while this change will be transparent, we expect you’ll notice three key differences when your models get routed to these providers:

• Significantly improved launch time: If you’ve been using our existing on-demand offering, you’ll know that occasionally launches can be slow. We’ve always been committed to improving the performance of our on-demand offering, and this release delivers on that commitment. Sessions that are routed to these new on-demand providers will have consistent launch times much closer to what you would see in our dedicated providers.
• Improved rendering performance: This new class of provider is built around the Nvidia RTX5000 GPU. This GPU is more tailored to rendering performance compared to a more general purpose GPU like the T4, which formed the backbone of our existing on-demand providers.
• Unity compatible!: A long standing challenge we’ve been working to address is the lack of Unity compatibility in our existing on-demand offering. Our new CoreWeave on-demand providers are fully compatible with Unity projects.

Best of all, all these improvements come at no additional cost to you.

Some things to know:

It’s important to note that our CoreWeave on-demand providers are not a replacement for our existing AWS on-demand providers, but a compliment to them. CoreWeave is currently only located in North America, and we will continue to fully leverage our AWS-based providers both in North America and around the world, in order to maximize the reach of your streaming experience.

If your project is configured for 'on-demand' that will mean both CoreWeave and AWS, and just like our existing on-demand providers, these new providers can function in a hybrid configuration with any dedicated providers you may have configured.

As we’ve talked about in previous releases, our global routing system takes a number of factors into consideration when making routing decisions in order to ensure you get the lowest latency connection with the minimum of wait time. These new providers help with that goal.

What’s next?:

You may be wondering what you can expect from PureWeb Reality in the coming months. If you look back at our recent release notes, you’ll see mention of several security improvements. We place your privacy and security as our top priority, and we intend to demonstrate this by being the only real-time streaming provider that is SOC 2 certified.

While we will continue to release non-security focused updates, we’ll be working hard over the next few months to ensure that we are able to comfortably clear a 3rd party audit, and demonstrate our security commitment to you with a qualified SOC 2 report. If you have any questions about anything in these notes, please feel free to reach out over discord, or at info@pureweb.com.

Happy Streaming!

2023-06 (Feb 6, 2023)

Summary

2023-6 is a minor update to our on-demand providers. Specifically, in the release notes for 2023-4, we talked about fixing an issue where non-North American users were occasionally experiencing unexpected session disconnections. The release last week implemented a partial fix for our dedicated providers, and today’s release adds the corresponding fix to our on-demand providers. There will still be a third release in the next couple of weeks within the SDK changes necessary to fully address the issue.

2023-05 (Feb 3, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-5 includes several security and observability improvements to the CoreWeave beta. None of the updates rolled out today will result in visible changes to the CoreWeave provider. Rather, this release significantly improves the internal observability systems prior to making this capability generally available to the public.

This includes improvements to our logging systems by making sure we’re logging everything necessary, as well as ensuring those logs are actionable. We've also added disk and infrastructure monitoring, as well improvements to our alerting system so that we can proactively identify and remediate issues before they impact the end user experience.

We anticipate at least one more CoreWeave-focused release in the next 1-3 weeks, after which we hope to be in a position to launch this capability out of beta.

2023-04 (Feb 2, 2023)

Summary

2023-4 is a smaller release focused on fixes for a handful of platform defects.

The primary change in this release is the removal of the old-style preview links that were deprecated in our last release. Now, all preview links can be revoked from your console account. For more information on this change, please see the notes for release 2023-3.

• Fixed an issue with model cleanup in our beta CoreWeave provider that would occasionally fail to clean up models if the provider configuration for the parent project was modified (i.e. changing a project from on-demand to dedicated).
• Implemented a partial fix to an issue some non-North American users were experiencing where in rare cases, a stream would unexpectedly terminate. This fix is in three parts, with this release delivering changes in the core platform, as well as the changes to our dedicated providers. We anticipate two subsequent releases in the coming weeks which should fully address the issue, one for our SDK, and another for our on-demand providers.
• Fixed a defect where in some cases, users would be routed to the an on-demand provider, even if a more optimal dedicated provider had free capacity.
• We also rolled out a handful of other fixes to internal systems and workflows that are used by are development and customer success teams in the creation and operation of PureWeb Reality. However, these changes only impact internal (PureWeb) users of the system.

2023-03 (Jan 16, 2023)

Summary

Today’s release is exclusively bug fixes and security improvements. However one of the security improvements introduces a deprecating change to the preview client. We sent out an email update about this change last week, but have included it below for completeness.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where console error messages would not be visible if your project contained several (~8+) models.
• Fixed the ‘Touch Events’ configuration setting in the ‘Share Model’ dialog. The dropdown menu previously did not include any options.
• Late last year we rolled out a new content security policy for the console and preview clients. This had the unintended consequence of preventing the preview client from being embedded in another website. This has been fixed, and the preview client should once again be embeddable.
• Updated the platform-cli to resolve an issue where passing the --yes flag to bypass interactive prompts when uploading / creating a model, the --exe flag would be ignored.
• Fixed an issue in the SDK where Unreal 5.1 models which employed ray tracing would fail to connect to a stream. This fix can be found in 3.23+ of the PureWeb platform SDK.
• Finally, this release introduces a new URL format for the preview client, which will also mean that the old format is deprecated and will be removed later this month. More on this change below.

Preview Client URL changes

Currently, if an anonymous preview link had been publicly disclosed, anyone can access that link in perpetuity. This presents security concerns, as it can lead to unexpected usage and consumption charges, and in the worst case, lead to denial of service attacks on your project.

The only way to prevent access to the project would be to take it offline, or turn off “Allow Unrestricted Access” access. Neither of these options are desirable if your intention is to continue using the preview client for public access, but you just want a better way of controlling that access. Based on feedback from our customers and guidance from our 3rd party security consultants, we’ve implemented a more secure mechanism for accessing preview links.

This release ensures that you can share your anonymous preview links, with the knowledge that you can revoke access to that link at any point in time, offering better control over who accesses your model.

What will be different with this change?

The current (soon-to-be-deprecated) pattern for preview links are of the form:
https://preview.pureweb.io/{project-ID}/{model-ID}/{version-ID}
Where all of the IDs are static for the life of the given model version (version ID is optional).

The new pattern for preview links will be in the following form:
https://preview.pureweb.io/{secure-hash}/{version-ID}
Where the version-ID is the same as it was before (still optional), but the secure hash will now resolve to your unique model and project. More importantly, you will be able to cycle the secure-hash at any point in time from the PureWeb console. This will invalidate any links that used the old hash, and provide you with a new link.

You can get this new hash URL either directly from the address bar of your browser in the preview client, or from the ‘Share’ menu in the model menu within your PureWeb Console account. This is also where you’ll be able to revoke and generate a new sharing URL. If you want to fully shut off public access, we still recommend disabling “Allow Unrestricted Access" in your project settings in the developer console.

This release will introduce the new URL mechanism as the default way of accessing the preview client. However, you’ll still be able to access your model via the old-style preview link for a minimum of two weeks.

On or after January 30th, we'll be removing the old URL pattern, at which point, only the new secure URL pattern will work.

What do you need to do?

If you have not shared preview links publicly, or embedded preview links in other websites, then you don’t have to do anything.

If you have embedded a static preview URL into another website, you’ll need to update that URL to a new dynamic hashed URL before January 30th.

Additionally, if you have shared an old-style static preview URL to colleagues, clients, or partners, you’ll have to send a new dynamic preview URL before January 30th.

If you access your model from a custom client, you do not need to make any changes, and your client and model access will not be affected.

2023-02 (Jan 5, 2023)

Summary

Release 2023-2 involved expanding our existing on-demand offering by adding a new server pool in Japan.  We’re always keeping a close eye on system usage, and based on user activity, we’ve decided it was warranted to add an additional pool in the Asian region, to help meet user demand, and ensure an even better streaming experience for users in the region.

If you are already using our on-demand offering, no updates or configuration changes will be needed. If you have streaming users in Asia, they will automatically use this pool, if it is the best option for them in terms of network latency.

2023-01 (Jan 4, 2023)

Summary

Our first release of 2023 is a major update to our new CoreWeave on-demand beta provider type.  As we get closer to the GA for this new capability, we are focused exclusively on security, stability, and performance improvements as well as integrating this new provider with our observability, health check, and eventing systems, so we can proactively monitor the system as it moves to production.  This release delivers over a dozen fixes and improvements along these lines.  For users of the system, you should generally see faster more consistent session launches with fewer errors.  We've also further improved process and model security in the runtime environment.  Finally, we've fixed a long standing defect in the beta that caused Unity games to max out at a resolution of 720p.

The last major push before the GA release of this capability is load and stress testing, which we’ll be focused on for the next few weeks.  We’ll be addressing any defects or bottlenecks that we identify as part of this load testing, after which, we anticipate that we'll be in a position to make this capability available to all users by default.