Anywhere Fleet using SDK 3.5 (old game that can't be upgraded to GameLift v5.0 SDK)

Question

I am operating an old game that has entered the "long tail" of its life cycle.  At some point the GameLift EC2-managed server costs will cost more than the game makes in revenues, which means the game will get shut down.  GameLift Anywhere fleets would solve that.

I have not been able to successfully upgrade the GameLift SDK from 3.5 to v5.0.  I've spent way too many hours on this, so I wanted to shift gears to see if something like the following might work:

GameLift SDK versions older than 5.0 only had InitSDK(), which expects there to be a GameLift agent running on the host.  This agent is provisioned by GameLift services when the EC2 instance is created.  Is there any way I could run this agent on my own hosts?  Could I maybe proxy requests to a GameLift endpoint?

fzehao · Answer

Hi capnjosh,

Unfortunately for server SDK 3/4, there's no Amazon GameLift "agent" that can run on your own hosts. There is an open source Amazon GameLift Agent that can work with Anywhere, however this is for SDK 5 so the migration to SDK 5 is still needed: https://github.com/aws/amazon-gamelift-agent

So to use Amazon GameLift Anywhere, the migration to SDK 5 is necessary. Can you let me know the issue you're facing when upgrading to SDK 5?

capnjosh · Answer

Thanks for confirming.  I think I will have to put more time into doing a proper upgrade to GameLift 5.0.

The challenge has been a self-imposed constraint to not upgrade the client application; only upgrade the server application and deploy new server binaries that would work with the existing client that's been out in the wild.  However, it seems the .net version upgrade that we have to do along with the GameLift SDK version upgrade causes some unexpected problems in the client-server communication.

Anywhere Fleet using SDK 3.5 (old game that can't be upgraded to GameLift v5.0 SDK)

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