ES5 is now available!

[tcarr]

Wooo hooo!!!!!!
Download ES5 (http://www.electrotank.com/resources/downloads.html)

[frank95a]

Cool and congrats,

Are the existing bugs for ES4 fixed here? Language filtering, admin panel etc.? Also is there an upgrade pricing from ES4?

Thanks

Frank

[tcarr]

New pricing is explained here (http://www.electrotank.com/es5.html). There is no discount for current license holders of ES4, however if you bought your ES4 license after we put up the "free upgrade to ES5" on the ES4 page (back in May) then you should be able to get a free license for ES5. I'm not on the sales end.

The admin panel is all new. We fixed some of the problems with language filtering, and the rest will be fixed in the next release. If you tell me what you need language filtering to do, I can give you a workaround in the meantime.

[bota999]

congrats,
look forward to start using it. Is there a downloadable/pdf release notes or other docs?

[tcarr]

We wrote the release notes but I don't think they have been added to the website yet. The manual can be found by clicking the Developer Resources (http://www.electrotank.com/resources.html) link on the nav bar of this forum.

[tcarr]

Release notes (http://www.electrotank.com/images/stories/dev-resources/ES5.0.0-ReleaseNotes.pdf) are now linked on the downloads page.

[ritty]

Waaaa....no upgrade pricing.

Can you explain what HTTP tunneling is?

[tcarr]

Use a gateway listener set on port 80 using the BinaryHTTP protocol. Instead of connecting using BinaryTCP, just set your settings.xml file to connect using BinaryHTTP. It's slower (HTTP instead of TCP), but it goes through all firewalls. We are suggesting that your clients first try to connect via BinaryTCP and if that doesn't work, try via BinaryHTTP, then store a cookie or something so that they remember which one worked.

[tcarr]

Oh, and while there isn't upgrade pricing, the overall prices are probably lower, right? Definitely for any license that was over 10K the new unlimited license will be lower.

[ritty]

Sadly, no. We have a 500 user license, which is far more than we need. 100 would be suitable. Thus, your lowest license at 1,000 users would cost us more than both our ES3 and ES4 licenses. Any ideas if a lower user license will ever be available?

[tcarr]

I have asked management to consider another license size, smaller than 1K users (and cheaper). I'll let you know if they approve of it.

[Yunspace]

After playing with this it's obvious there's alot of good work put into ES5. Love the new air based admin panel. Glad to see the C# api is in there too so I can hook up my silverlight app.

Personally I think the pricing is quite reasonable, at around $1 per CCU for a solid supported product. The unlimited license pricing is unmatched so far, and the cloud hosting solution will definitely be a first amongst socket server vendors.

Btw, are there any basic C# specific examples by any chance? At the moment I'm just referencing the actionscript samples and try to migrate the code. The client api seems consistent across different languages, which helps alot.

Edit: also another question would be are there any support plans that come with the license purchase? Or does it strictly go by dollar amount per hour?

[tcarr]

I wrote two C# non-Unity examples: ConnectAndLoginManually, and SimpleChat. We have 4(?) C# with Unity3D examples and one game, and also some XNA examples. We do not have a Silverlight example. We have either a ConnectAndLogin, ConnectAndLoginManually, or SimpleChat example for every client API that we support at the moment. We tried hard to keep the client apis as similar as possible; this also makes support and tutorials easier, because if we explain how to do something using AS3 it shouldn't be difficult to figure out how to do it using C# or Java or whatever.

We don't have any set support plans other than the per hour one, however we do have contract support plans that would be negotiated individually and usually the way they work is that you get so many free support hours per month for so much cost per year. We do still offer a lot of completely free support, mostly through the forum.

[jobem]

Ritty,

There is an option coming soon that should fit your needs. We're not ready to publicize the details. If you're not already talking with Teresa privately you should contact her and we'll fill you in a bit.

[frank95a]

Given the amount of functionality that were advertised for ES4 and never delivered... and the existing amount of bugs in ES4, I would have imagined that the management would have an upgrade path... After all, we spent a lot of time and effort working around the bugs in admin panel, language filters, etc.

Would have appreciated the management taking note of the fact... and provided an upgrade path/pricing

Be that as it may, good luck