Changelog

💡Workstation Creation Flow

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We made the workstation flow much faster, cleaner and overall easier to use. Say bye to our ugly modal we’ve had for the last year, say hello to a 2-steps flow.

Start by choosing the software you use the most:

• Game Developper (Unity, Unreal, Visual Studio, etc)
• Video Editor (Premiere Pro, Photoshop, etc)
• …

and the select the specs you need. Start using your tailored machine in less than a minute. You need something else? That machine is automatically set-up in the closest server possible!

🌟 Improvements

• Refund of 95% of workstation subscription if deleted less than 24h after first subscription

• Easier way to turn on workstations

• Billing and Help pages now open in a new tab

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed a bug where adding a group to the workspace would empty the users
• Fixed bugs with deleting a group and the group would not be removed from authorised groups of the workstation
• Fixed a bug where creating a payment method before a workstation would result in a failure
• Fixed a bug where users would not see the right tax collection amount during checkout
• Fixed a bug where our Load Balancing System would fail during workstation deletion
• Fixed a bug where Storage Size could be not compatible during workstation creation
• Fixed a bug where reset password would fail
• Fixed a bug where creating a Workstation would fail because of internal tags
• Fixed a bug where deleting a workstation ,that not paid, before 24h would fail

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Most of this sprint for me was spent at MIFA, however I did get some time to implement a simple Ack system:

Acks (acknowledgements) are sent in response to a packet arriving to let the sender know that their packet arrived. These are a part of the TCP protocol, however we are using UDP. We still want the acks, but we don’t want to wait like TCP does. This will let us determine in future what our packet loss is and allow us to react in real time to changing network conditions.

Since UDP is an unreliable transport, we need to pack in some redundancy. We don’t want to waste data, so we are going to pack 32 boolean values into a single 32-bit integer using the binary. Each ack will then contain the packet it is acknowledging and a record of whether the last 32 values have been received. That was if our ack gets lost, there are 32 more chances it will be recorded.

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💡Single Sign-On

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We unveiled the new sign up process 2 weeks ago, and we keep going in the same direction: simplicity and rapidity. Organizations can now enable Azure Directory SSO with Flaneer, invite their members and synchronise groups and permissions with their Flaneer instances. You can now directly enable Azure directory groups for specific type of machines or environments!

With the same mindset, we are now implementing Google and Microsoft SSO and they will soon be available. New users will now be able to directly sign-up with those accounts!

🌟 Improvements

• User creating a new workstation gets added in the list of authorised users
• Workstation groups now shut downs quicker
• Workstation groups are now reaching a 99% launch reliability
• The web streaming tab will now display the name of the workstation

• The workstation deletion will now ask to type the name of the workstation to confirm the deletion, to avoid deleting workstation without wanting it
• It is now possible to rename a workstation after creating it

🐛 Fixes

• User signing-up now gets a default first name, last name and organisation name
• Fix a bug with group’s name preview when adding new users
• Fix a bug that would block some users to access their workstation even after a successful payment
• Fix Streaming Protocol issues related to our best performances settings
• Fix the way we delete users on Flaneer
• Fix a bug with our “Turn off workstation” button on the Streaming toolbar

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Heard of the Platinum Jubilee?

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💡New sign-up process

We reduced the number of steps to create a Flaneer account, and its now the fastest it can be. (until we implement Google SSO of course). You can now create your virtual PC in less than a minute. We are also working on our new Workstation creation flow. No more tedious modal or hard to read dropdown: everything is available in one place.

Say hello to your blazing fast new PC.

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🌟 Improvements

• New users now get a default name and organization name
• Every organization can now use Windows Server 2022 templates in their library
• We improved the “Add To Group“ dropDown modal

• Improve Work Station Groups instances warming to reduce session start failures

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the macOS shortcut for the Mouse - Gaming mode feature
• Fixed an issue that would set Persistent Workstation’s timeout to NaN
• Add a Lock mechanism to solve issues with concurrent new session’s requests

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Logging!

When we are beginning to look at the performance of our video streaming solution, the temptation is to get stuck right in and start ripping the guts out. However, a wise move is to take a step back and start to look at how we are going to perform our measurements. We need a robust and easy to read logging output.

We chose to leverage https://spectreconsole.net/ for pretty ✨ looking logs. That isn’t just a vanity thing, colours and emojis can help encode lots of information in a smaller space.

Not only is logging to the console important, but being able to observe important statistics as you work. As such, we can now log directly to the window title with an easy API:

That FPS is looking a little low 👀…. back to work!

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