Shaun_Max Would you be able to provide some insights on AE & what exactly was happening behind the scenes especially with all the data like leaderboard scores, logs & events?
Actually, I'd have to ask Holger for this – as I said, he is the one who wrote the server side code and thus knows much better what's going on there. What I know is that a very long time was spent to write the code in a way that makes sure the costs of the App Engine do not grow too high (with mixed success). The pricing in the AE was really very complex – it was really hard to predict what operation we did would cause which costs. Since we wanted Flox' pricing model, in contrast, to be very simple, we had to add many workarounds.
The leaderboard was a custom implementation Holger wrote, in any case, taking that pricing into account as well as making sure it's easy to use. We initially wanted to be able to provide much longer leaderboards (i.e. with more entries), but that unfortunately never made it off the TODO list.
What I also remember is that the hardest part of the implementation was the search/index feature of the entities. In our case, we needed users to be able to add indices at runtime, while the App Engine actually requires XMLs to be set up on build time to define indices. Via some magic, Holger was able to get that done, but it was extremely complex. 🤯
Shaun_Max The last thing I would like to know is about the web interface, in app for loading database score it required 1 ops but on web it was unlimited & free, how?
Actually, it did cause us costs, but we figured most apps would generate the majority of ops from gameplay, anyway, so we didn't forward those costs to the users.
2dguy May I ask what is stopping the Flox code form being released into the public?
There shouldn't be any problems with licensing, usage rights, etc., but we just think that it wouldn't be much use to others. As I wrote above, there are lots of workaround in there for pricing, much of which actually turned out to be ineffective, so it would need a whole lot of clean up. Furthermore, it's not documented, and complex to deploy.