Release & Upgrade Notes

Below, you’ll find the release notes for the latest version of the Genvid MILE SDK. This section also includes release notes from previous versions of the SDK and instructions for upgrading earlier versions.



Genvid MILE SDK 1.42.0

Welcome to Genvid MILE SDK 1.42.0. This release is ready and stable for integration and can be used for local development and limited cloud deployment. We are still missing some features for a complete production deployment which can be provided through other software. Please contact us at support@genvidtech.com if you’re planning a production deployment.

We are still committed to a regular pace for our releases until we get all the features done for a comfortable production deployment. We always work to ensure a smooth upgrade between releases and provide as much backward compatibility support as possible. A complete list of our Known Issues and Workarounds is available to you on our AnswerHub pages. Please contact us if you have any issues.

Current Functionalities

Here is a summary of our current functionalities. See Major Fixes and Changes below for the list of new features in this release.

  • Automatic synchronization between video and game-data streams.

  • Video streaming to YouTube and Twitch.

  • JavaScript SDK for embedded webpage.

  • Multiple distributed sources of A/V and Data.

  • Streaming additional arbitrary game events and notifications.

  • Scalable event messaging system.

  • Windows C++ API with a C# wrapper.

  • Video encoding (H264 + AAC).

  • Unity3D integration (Game and Management).

  • Unreal Engine integration (Game and Management).

  • D3D11 or raw frame video capture.

  • WASAPI audio capture.

  • Tools and scripts for managing your local and remote clusters, with example scripts for AWS and Azure.

  • Live video editing and basic composition effects (beta).

  • RTMP Ingest server (beta).

  • REST API to control the services (beta).

  • Metrics feed.

  • Load-testing library.

  • Multiple integration samples.

  • Extensive documentation.

Major Fixes and Changes

New Requests Feature (Beta)

The REST and C APIs for the new Requests feature are now available for the webgateway service. This is an early beta release and there may be significant changes before it is finalized. We will provide complete documentation in a future release.

New Static Clusters Feature

New REST and C APIs can now allow to create and update static cluster through the genvid toolbox.

  • [toolbox] Added static-cluster-create and static-cluster-update commands to genvid-clusters.

Minor Changes and Other Fixes

  • [sdk] Fixed an issue where unsubscribing a command with a null callback or ID returns an error.

  • [sdk] Fixed an issue where a deadlock or a race condition happens when calling subscription-related APIs within a callback. See the upgrade notes for more information.

  • [sdk] Fixed an issue where submitting game data, annotations, or notifications with an empty size returned an error.

  • [web-sdk] Added debug overlay to genvidClient2.

  • [toolbox] Improved the output of genvid-clusters cluster-show and genvid-clusters cluster-list by converting list and dict to JSON before output.

  • [toolbox] Added ‘plain text’ and ‘download’ links to the Logs interface, with the corresponding API.

  • [toolbox] Added genvid-sync to allow efficiently synchronizing folders between a local drive and Amazon S3.

  • [gvencode] Fixed an issue where incorrect output FPS was being logged.

  • [gvencode] Fixed an issue causing broadcast errors to not be reported when the connection with IVS breaks.

  • [samples] Fixed the error: PPtr cast failed when dereferencing! Casting from PrefabInstance to Prefab in the Unity Cube sample UnitySceneRoot scene.

  • [samples] Updated notifications in the different Cube Samples to use consistent data-formats.

  • [samples] Fixed the Unity Cube Sample lighting issues using Unity 2021.

  • [unity] Removed an unnecessary call to GetParameters inside GenvidVideoUtils.cs that resulted in an error log.

  • [unity] Stopped GenvidPlugin from forcing the Unity executable to run in Windowed mode. See the upgrade notes for more information.

  • [unity] Added a warning message when trying to sync the DLL after it’s loaded in memory. (For example, when running the game in the editor.) Once Unity loads a native plugin from script it never gets unloaded. The only way to unload is to restart Unity.

  • [unity] Added plugin classes without a namespace to the Genvid namespace.

  • [unity] Fixed an issue where the stack get corrupted when a C# callback was called from the DLL. The bug was only apparent in 32-bits but could have had other side effects in 64 bits.

  • [unity] Improved the Unity plugin code-consistency by applying access specifiers to class members and by restricting MonoBehaviour functions access to private.

  • [nats] Upgraded nats-server from v2.7.2 to v2.9.9.

  • [studio ui] Moved Studio UI link under Monitor section of Cluster UI.

  • [unreal] Added Requests API to UE4 Plugin (beta)

  • [unreal] Improved the management of UE4 modules by unifying them under one plugin and using module dependencies. See the upgrade notes and the Unreal Engine Integration documentation for more details.

  • [unreal] Fixed an issue where the editor module was initialized when running a cook run, displaying an error and failing.

  • [unreal] Fixed an issue where the MainMap were not able to access the Collect Cubes function when cooking.

  • [unreal] Force the Cube Sample for Unreal Engine to target Windows and use D3D11 by default.

  • [unreal] Removed deprecated classes UGenvidStreamer and UGenvidWorldSettings from Unreal Plugin.

  • [unreal] Fixed an issue where game server was crashing when trying to access uninitilized member.

  • [unreal] The Genvid SDK is now properly initialized even on server mode, except that no streams (Audio, Video or Data) are created.

Known Issues

genvid-sdk upload-images or upload-images-sdk leads to error ERROR: (InvalidValuesForRequestParameters).

When running either genvid-sdk upload-images or genvid-sdk upload-images-sdk, you may see the following error message:

ERROR: (InvalidValuesForRequestParameters) Values for request parameters are invalid: networkAcls.ipRules[].

When running either command, the Genvid Toolbox adds your bastion’s IP addresses to the storage account. However, Azure storage accounts have a limit of 200 IP addresses. So, running either command may exceed that limit. See the official Azure documentation for more information.

As a workaround, you can remove extra IP addresses from the storage account. From the Azure portal:

  1. Go to Home ‣ Storage Accounts ‣ [Your account] ‣ Networking.

  2. Select Enabled from selected virtual networks and IP addresses.

  3. Remove IP addresses from the list.

  4. Save your changes.

  5. Run the genvid-sdk command that caused the error.

Only one application with the Genvid MILE SDK integrated may run at a time if not launched using Nomad.

If an application using the Genvid MILE SDK is launched without Nomad, a default session name is assigned to it. This is useful when testing your application in the Unity engine, Unreal engine, or booting your application manually.

Currently, the Genvid MILE SDK is unable to support multiple applications launched this way unless you change the environment variable GENVID_SESSION_NAME to a unique name. You can also launch your applications via Nomad to avoid this issue.

We will fix this in a future release.

Azure reports requested instance size not available.

On Azure, we are using a compute instance type Standard_NV6 for the game machine. For some accounts, only the promo version of this instance type is available (Standard_NV6_Promo).

When doing the Terraform setup on the Azure module, you may encounter the error:

The requested size for resource 'XXXX-game-1' is currently not available in location 'XXXX'

As a workaround:

  1. Open the Terraform Settings page.

  2. Change the instance_game_type to Standard_NV6_Promo.

  3. Open the Commands page.

  4. Select Plan apply ‣ Apply again.

Streaming to an iOS device with the Standalone player is currently not functional.

Streaming to an iOS device (iPhones and iPads) with the Standalone player is currently not functional. This issue will be fixed in a future release.

When changing Availability Zones in Azure, resources need to be destroyed and rebuilt.

When changing AZs in Azure, deleting the public IP might fail due to it not being detached from the virtual machine. This is a bug in the Terraform provider. See the issue on the Hashicorp Github for more information.

As a workaround, manually detach the offending public IPs from the virtual machines in the Azure portal.

genvid-sdk upload-images-sdk command fails to upload the Docker image on Azure Cloud.

Some Docker images can’t be uploaded to Azure Cloud using the genvid-sdk upload-images-sdk command due to large sizes. (You will get an SSL error and a Max retries exceeded message.)

As a workaround:

  1. Open the Azure UI.

  2. Upload your image manually.

  3. Run genvid-sdk upload-images-sdk again.

Required to manually remove the subdomain NS record when updating the subdomain on an existing AWS cluster.

When creating an AWS cluster using basic_cluster_alb_ssl or minimal_cluster_alb_ssl, the domain and subdomain are provided. When updating an existing cluster’s subdomain, the route53 NS record for the previous subdomain needs to be removed manually from the main domain. This is due to how the NS record is handled within our Terraform.

Unable to delete subnets in cluster basic_cluster_alb_ssl using AWS.

When changing subnet_cidr_block_size in basic_cluster_alb_ssl, decreasing the number of AZs, or reordering existing AZs, the cluster will get stuck trying to delete the subnets.

Reapplying the configuration won’t resolve the issue.

Workaround: delete and recreate the cluster.

Bastion cluster Settings page modal window not closing.

In the Bastion Settings page for a cluster, the Properties modal window for custom tags doesn’t close when you click outside of it.

As a workaround, click on Properties again to close the modal window.

Studio UI becomes unresponsive.

In a case where bins and/or NATS services became unhealthy, the Studio UI will became unresponsive

As a workaround, restart the Studio job once the bins and NATS jobs are back to healthy states.

On Azure, the audio and video streams may become de-synchronized.

When capturing a video stream at 60 FPS on Azure, the audio stream slowly becomes de-synchronized compared to the video stream.

Limitations

Loading configurations in the incorrect order can overwrite values.

Whether you’re using SSL on a cloud or a local cluster, if you load youtube.sample.hcl before loading the web sample, the web sample will overwrite the value associated with the embed_ssl from the web.hcl file.

Large NTP time offsets will prevent the stream from playing.

If you encounter large NTP time offsets, your stream may stop playing. As a workaround, make sure that the game machine is configured to update its clock automatically. For local configurations, replace the AWS IP address with pool.ntp.org.

See the AWS configuration section for more information.

Studio can’t take inputs of the same control from multiple windows.

If Studio is opened in more than one browser window and inputs are received from different sources to one control, the final value will then bounce between the different inputs instead of updating it to the latest one. For example, in Audio Mixer Widget, if a user changes the slider of Master Gain to 20 db and another user then changes it to 0 db, the slider handle will bounce between 20 db and 0 db instead of being set to 0 db.

Sending input from multiple Studio windows to one control is not recommended until we resolve the issue.

The application doesn’t work properly after Windows comes back from sleep.

Nomad has some difficulties with sleeping jobs, including itself. This is unlikely to get fixed in Nomad, but shouldn’t happen in a production environment. The best workaround at present is to not allow Windows to go to sleep when you are running the service, or simply to restart the service with a genvid-bastion reinstall. (Unfortunately, genvid-bastion restart is not sufficient.)

The SDK clamps framerates under 1.0.

To prevent issues, we raised the lower limit for the framerate to 1.0 for any stream. The SDK will clamp the value to 1.0 FPS if it’s less than 1.0.

Default value for an Azure resource group name may be too long.

If no values are provided for the variable resource_group_name, the value is set to a combination of {bastionid}-{clustername}. This can yield names longer than 64 characters, which is the maximum number of characters allowed for an Azure resource group name.

To avoid this problem, always provide a value of 64 characters or less for the variable resource_group_name.

See the Azure Github for more information on Azure naming conventions.

AWS clusters subnet collision error.

If you reduce the subnet_cidr_block_size and increase the number of AZs for an AWS cluster at the same time, it causes a subnet collision error.

If you encounter this issue, reapply the configuration to resolve it.

No new tags on Azure disk when updating a cluster.

When applying new tags to Azure clusters, tags will not be applied to disk unless the virtual machine instance that owns the disk gets recreated during the apply process.

As a workaround, delete and recreate the cluster to resolve the issue.

Cluster names are limited to 64 characters.

Cluster names are limited to 64 characters due to limitations with the file system in Windows. Things like the system’s username and cluster name factor into the max number of characters of the file directory.

While it is technically possible to go above 64 characters, the results can be unpredictable.