Posted On: Feb 28, 2022
We are excited to announce three updates to Amazon GameLift’s FlexMatch, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed service. GameLift FlexMatch launched in 2017 as a feature that uses a powerful matchmaking algorithm and flexible developer-defined rules to create high-quality matches at AWS scale.
Today's updates expand existing matchmaking functionality that will allow customers to create more evenly matched player teams with greater precision. The three updates are as follows:
- Support for compound rules. Today, the behavior in a FlexMatch matchmaker rule set is that all of the rules must hold true to form a match. Effectively this means that all rules use the “AND” logical operator. With compound rules, more complex constructs are possible. FlexMatch now supports the following additional logical operators in addition to “AND”: “OR”, “NOT”, and “XOR”.
- Longer string lists. Customers are able to pass in different player attributes to FlexMatch, e.g., numbers, strings, or a list of strings. String lists are currently limited to 10 strings. With today’s update, that limit is increased to 100. One common use case by customers is to use the string list as a “blocklist” for players. Now, instead of blocking only 10 players, you can block up to 100.
- More flexible team selection. FlexMatch “property expressions” are used to perform logical operations with player attributes regarding team selection. Previously, they were limited to apply to one or all teams, only. With today's update, you can use property expressions to target more than one team without having to target all teams.
As a reminder, GameLift is available in 82 instance types and 23 public regions so you can pick the instance type and geography that is best for your game. Public regions include: US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), Canada (Central), China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD, Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, and Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and South America (São Paulo).
To learn more, read our blog, check out the GameLift release notes or dive into the GameLift product page.