Guides on Agones

Feature Stages

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 01:20:41 +0000

Supported Versions

Agones versions are expressed as x.y.z, where x is the major version, y is the minor version, and z is the patch version following Semantic Versioning terminology.

Agones Features

A feature within Agones can be in Alpha, Beta or Stable stage.

Feature Gates

Alpha and Beta features can be enabled or disabled through the agones.featureGates configuration option that can be found in the Helm configuration documentation. Stable features are always enabled, and exist for upgrade compatibility, and cannot be disabled.

Windows Gameservers

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 23:00:00 +0000

Warning

Running GameServers on Windows nodes is currently Alpha, and any feedback would be appreciated.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to create a GameServer:

A Kubernetes cluster with the UDP port range 7000-8000 open on each node. Creating the firewall.
Agones controller installed in the targeted cluster
kubectl properly configured
Netcat which is already installed on most Linux/macOS distributions, for windows you can use WSL.

If you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster you can follow these instructions to create a cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Minikube or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and install Agones.

Fleet Updates

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 03:58:19 +0000

Rolling Update Strategy

When Fleets are edited and updated, the default strategy of Agones is to roll the new version of the GameServer out to the entire Fleet, in a step by step increment and decrement by adding a chunk of the new version and removing a chunk of the current set of GameServers.

This is done while ensuring that Allocated GameServers are not deleted until they are specifically shutdown through the game servers SDK, as they are expected to have players on them.

GameServer Health Checking

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:20:19 +0000

Disabling Health Checking

By default, health checking is enabled, but it can be turned off by setting the spec.health.disabled property to true.

SDK API

The Health() function on the SDK object needs to be called at an interval less than the spec.health.periodSeconds threshold time to be considered before it will be considered a failure.

The health check will also need to have not been called a consecutive number of times (spec.health.failureThreshold), giving it a chance to heal if it there is an issue.

GameServer Counters and Lists

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Warning

The Counters and Lists feature is currently Beta, and while it is enabled by default it may change in the future.

Use the Feature Gate CountsAndLists to disable this feature.

See the Feature Gate documentation for details on how to disable features.

Counters and Lists is provided as a way to track arbitrary integer counter values as well as lists of values against a GameServer by a user provided key.

Player Tracking

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Counters and Lists replaces the Alpha functionality of Player Tracking, and Player Tracking will soon be removed from Agones.

If you are currently using this Alpha feature, please plan on migrating to use Counters and Lists to ensure it meets all your needs.

Warning

The Player Tracking feature is currently Alpha, not enabled by default, and may change in the future.

Use the FeatureGate PlayerTracking to enable and test this feature.

Local Game Server

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 08:00:00 +0000

You can register a local game server with Agones. This means you can run an experimental build of your game server in the Agones environment without the need of packaging and deploying it to a fleet. This allows you to quickly iterate on your game server code while still being able to plugin to your Agones environment.

Register your server with Agones

To register your local game server you’ll need to know the IP address of the machine running it and the port. With that you’ll create a game server config like the one below.

Latency Testing with Multiple Clusters

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:20:30 +0000

To make latency testing easier, Agones installs with a simple ping service with both HTTP and UDP services that can be called for the purpose of timing how long the roundtrip takes for information to be returned from either of these services.

Installing

By default, Agones installs Kubernetes Services for both HTTP and the UDP ping endpoints. These can be disabled entirely, or disabled individually. See the Helm install guide for the parameters to pass through, as well as configuration options.

Metrics

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 03:58:19 +0000

Agones controller exposes metrics via OpenCensus. OpenCensus is a single distribution of libraries that collect metrics and distributed traces from your services, we only use it for metrics but it will allow us to support multiple exporters in the future.

We choose to start with Prometheus as this is the most popular with Kubernetes but it is also compatible with Cloud Monitoring. If you need another exporter, check the list of supported exporters. It should be pretty straightforward to register a new one. (GitHub PRs are more than welcome.)

Access Agones via the Kubernetes API

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:20:41 +0000

Installing Agones creates several Custom Resource Definitions (CRD), which can be accessed and manipulated through the Kubernetes API.

The detailed list of Agones CRDs with their parameters could be found here - Agones CRD API Reference.

Kubernetes has multiple client libraries, however, at time of writing, only the Go and Python clients are documented to support accessing CRDs.

This can be found in the Accessing a custom resource section of the Kubernetes documentation.

At this time, we recommend interacting with Agones through the Go client that has been generated in this repository, but other methods may also work as well.

Troubleshooting

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 01:20:49 +0000

Something went wrong with my GameServer

If there is something going wrong with your GameServer, there are a few approaches to determining the cause:

Run with the local SDK server

A good first step for seeing what may be going wrong is replicating the issue locally. To do this you can take advantage of the Agones local SDK server , with the following troubleshooting steps:

Run your game server as a local binary against the local SDK server
Run your game server container against the local SDK server. It’s worth noting that running with docker run --network=host ... can be an easy way to allow your game server container(s) access to the local SDK server)

At each stage, keep an eye on the logs of your game server binary, and the local SDK server, and ensure there are no system errors.