(Click here to find 2022 release notes)

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.

Click here if you are looking for previous release notes.