In November 2021, Rob was able to announce an incredible new Battlesnake feature he had been working very hard on: Engine Regions.
Today, we are pleased to share that he has emerged again from behind his monitors to let us know that we have expanded global coverage with new Engine Regions hosted on DigitalOcean.
How Engine Regions Work
Battlesnake Engine Regions allow players to host their Battlesnake wherever suits them best, without being penalized by additional latency between their Battlesnake and the Game Engine.
The Engine Region feature allows you to select an Engine Region server closer to where your Battlesnake is hosted, and then measures the response time between your Battlesnake and the Engine Region server you choose. All Engine Regions are compatible, and Battlesnake games continue to be played globally.
For a full list of all supported Engine Regions, and instructions on how to set your Battlesnake's region, check out our documentation.
New Engine Region Locations
We have added three new servers located in Singapore, Frankfurt Germany, and Toronto Canada.
All three of these new regions are hosted on DigitalOcean. If you host your Battlesnake on DigitalOcean already, you can switch your Battlesnake to use a matching region and should be able to squeeze every last millisecond out for processing your /move requests.
These locations should better support our Battlesnake friends in Central Europe, Eastern Canada/USA, and the fine folks in Southeast Asia, New Zealand, and Australia, who have suffered for some time with rather high latencies.
Go to your profile at http://play.battlesnake.com/me, choose a Battlesnake and click "Edit", and you'll see the dropdown to change your "Engine Region".
Did you know that DigitalOcean is a 2022 Battlesnake League Partner, and that they are offering a $100 credit for Battlesnake developers wanting to try them out?
GCP Beta Test Concluded
We are also officially taking the previously released Google Cloud Platform Regions and ending their Beta period - they are here to stay! Thanks to everyone who tested them out and provided feedback on them, we really appreciate it. These Engine Regions will continue to be available for any Battlesnake player to use.
GCP Regions have been promoted out of Beta
Feedback!
If you are using the new Engine Regions and notice any issues, or just want to brag about how much faster your Battlesnake is, please let us know in the Feedback Repo, or on Discord. If you send us a game ID, we can take a look in our logs.