Patch notes for the Gang Beasts 0.6.1 beta build and Steam Free Weekend

Update at 20:30 BST on Friday 21 September

We've been working with Coatsink and Multiplay for the last 24 hours to fix server performance and matchmaking issues identified in the first span of servers tests. There are still some minor issues and annoyances with the process for starting online game sessions but the key issues compromising the stability and performance of the matchmaking service has been addressed and patched.

The matchmaking service has been taken down in the last 30 minutes for some minor fixes but is coming back online currently and should be availanble for a second batch of stress testing in the next 10. Connecting to the current online multiplayer implementation requires updating to the 0.6.2 build.

Sorry that we were not able to provision servers in less time and the interruption in access to online games, we don't have the volume of players using the unstable builds to fully stress test the new networking scheme and needed to publish the server testing builds as default Steam builds to make testing valid but we're now close to having a stable and scalable hosting platform that supports both public and private game sessions and can support other online game modes.

Update at 3:20 BST on Thursday 21 September

Coatsink have identified the issue as a deadlock in one of the client threads when it receives a high volume of requests; the issue has been isolated to an authentication process.

The matchmaker is available currently but it will continue to ignore some request until Coatsink can finishing patching in the morning (the time in the UK is approx. 3.20am), apologies for the interruption, this is an issue we didn't identify in internal testing or testing in the "unstable" build as we could not manufacture the volume of concurrent users.

We will post an update to this post as soon as we have an estimated time for the second stress test (we currently expect the second stress test to require downloading a new client build, Steam should prompt you to download when this build is available).

Update at 23:30 BST on Thursday 21 September

Coatsink have identified a single issue to fix before we can push the matchmaking update, we will post more information soon.

Update at 20:25 BST on Thursday 21 September

Coatsink have temporarily taken the matchmaking server offline to patch some issues identified in the first batch of tests, will post an ETA for when they are back online soon.

Patch notes for the Gang Beasts 0.6.1 beta build and Steam Free Weekend

Since the Gang Beasts online beta in August 2016, Boneloaf have been working with a small team at Coatsink to finish the content and systems for the full game, a significant part of this work has been to transition to Multiplay’s dedicated game hosting solution and Hybrid Cloud Orchestration technology to give official Gang Beasts servers a scalable, low-latency, managed hosting platform maintained by a specialist team of game server experts.

We have published the Gang Beasts 0.6.1 Early Access beta to Steam in the last hour and have made the game temporarily free on Early Access as a Steam Free Weekend game from 10am PDT / 6pm BST on Thursday 21 September to 1pm PDT / 9pm BST on Sunday 24 September to stress test the new server architecture and networking scheme and support for private sessions on official servers.

Please see the post at beef.city/060 for information and a changlog listing the key modifications and fixes in the 0.6.0 unstable build. For more information on Multiplay please see the Press press release at beef.city/multiplay

For reference we expect to have some inconsistencies with server availability and stability in the next hours as we transition to Multiplay's servers and scale server capacity.