State of GameSalad update?

NNterprises

Hey guys,

So I don't know if anyone else is the same way, but I haven't been hearing ANYTHING about Gamesalad on these forums from the staff for a couple of weeks.

People have been saying there is an update coming out on the 1.25.61 thread but I didn't see or hear anything about it.
There hasn't been a Game of the Month thread even started for July and July is halfway over. And they didn't even mention the winner of June.
Like how is the Gamesalad in education stuff going? Is that where all these new members are coming from? Students?

We just got a new CEO who game an introduction and then didn't hear much since. Maybe they're all on vacation after the hard work with the 1.25.61 release.

Just wondering and ranting, it's been oddly quiet. Communication is key.

Armelline

I can't speak for GameSalad but I can give a little information.

A new update is coming soon. It's gone to internal testing, but it's a very significant "under the hood" update with massive speed improvements, so it's unlikely the next build to go to testers will be the last. But, what we've seen so far is a huge improvement on previous versions.

Game of the Month has been hit a little this month by the organisers being unusually busy, but also by a lot of debate regarding the winner. There's not been a clear decision from the judges, with opinion pretty evenly split. But just yesterday it was commented that it really is needed to get the winner posted and a new month opened up. Remember this is a community run thing now, so it's a case of people doing their best.

As for the educational push, that's something I have no knowledge of. I doubt we'll get any info though. It's not standard for private companies to publicly release sales data. I assume when there's new, we'll hear it.

NNterprises

Thank you @Armelline , just what I was looking for. Simple straight forward update

Socks

@Armelline said:
A new update is coming soon. It's gone to internal testing, but it's a very significant "under the hood" update with massive speed improvements . . .

When you say 'speed improvements', are you referring to the interface or the game engine ?

Armelline

@Socks said:

@Armelline said:
A new update is coming soon. It's gone to internal testing, but it's a very significant "under the hood" update with massive speed improvements . . .

When you say 'speed improvements', are you referring to the interface or the game engine ?

Interface. I'm opening huge actors in <2 seconds. Ones that take 20+ seconds even in the latest public release.

AlchimiaStudios

@Armelline said:

@Socks said:

@Armelline said:
A new update is coming soon. It's gone to internal testing, but it's a very significant "under the hood" update with massive speed improvements . . .

When you say 'speed improvements', are you referring to the interface or the game engine ?

Interface. I'm opening huge actors in <2 seconds. Ones that take 20+ seconds even in the latest public release.

Sounds promising!

Socks

@Armelline said:
Interface. I'm opening huge actors in <2 seconds. Ones that take 20+ seconds even in the latest public release.

Cheers for the reply.

ForumNinja

Armelline is correct. The new build has improved the speed of opening complex actors.

Sadly this caused some repercussions and codewizard had to do a nasty refactor of some code, so this build is taking longer than expected to come out.

There's still some bugs we're working out before sending this to our volunteer testers, but on the bright side this build currently has undo put back in and UI's that remember what you were doing.

Here's an example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ounku5hj6zddkj/Preview.mov?dl=0

@Socks This also means that when you scroll all the way to the edge of a large scene and enter an actor etc, when you come back to the scene you'll be right where you left off.

Socks

@ForumNinja said:
. . . but on the bright side this build currently has undo put back in and UI's that remember what you were doing.

Here's an example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ounku5hj6zddkj/Preview.mov?dl=0

@Socks This also means that when you scroll all the way to the edge of a large scene and enter an actor etc, when you come back to the scene you'll be right where you left off.

Wow !!!

This is fantastic . . . . for me this is bigger than custom fonts, video rewards and polygonal collisions put together !! Great stuff !

RThurman

@ForumNinja said:
this build currently has undo put back in and UI's that remember what you were doing.

That is great news!

AlchimiaStudios

@ForumNinja said:
Armelline is correct. The new build has improved the speed of opening complex actors.

Sadly this caused some repercussions and codewizard had to do a nasty refactor of some code, so this build is taking longer than expected to come out.

There's still some bugs we're working out before sending this to our volunteer testers, but on the bright side this build currently has undo put back in and UI's that remember what you were doing.

Here's an example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ounku5hj6zddkj/Preview.mov?dl=0

@Socks This also means that when you scroll all the way to the edge of a large scene and enter an actor etc, when you come back to the scene you'll be right where you left off.

That is going to help so much in speeding up workflow.

BigDave

i personally see no hurry for a new update as the current one is solid.
Everyone that has worked with unstable or bad performing builds in the past probably can agree here.

That said if you work on that kind of UI improvements there is one big one to me.

If you go into and actor while having for example level 2 opened and hit the play preview button within it.

Expected behaviour: Play level 2
Real behaviour: Plays the first scene within the project file

How I avoid it right now effectively, I move the scene I work on as the first scene in the project file. But still if you switch between scenes and go In and out between actors I find myself triggering the wrong scenes. Expecting the last opened scene to be the relevant for the preview.

Armelline

@BigDave said:
If you go into and actor while having for example level 2 opened and hit the play preview button within it.

Expected behaviour: Play level 2
Real behaviour: Plays the first scene within the project file

I'd hate to see this changed. Right now, it's easy to play from either the specific scene, or the start. If they made this change, you'd have to navigate back to the home screen in Creator to play your game from the start. I think the current way it works makes perfect sense.

BigDave

@Armelline
if you want to always play the game from the start,yes
if you have longer games with multiple levels this is absolutely unintuitive.
Its very unlikely you go through each level again,from the very first one, just to test the change in the current level.
You would expect to play the scene you currently are working on.

But I guess the work around is good enough.
Just put the scene you currently working on as first.
Just realised this fixing several small scene related stuff in multiple scenes.

NNterprises

Thanks @ForumNinja !
No rush, 1.25.61 is good, but it's always great to hear some updates and news.

Armelline

@BigDave said:
You would expect to play the scene you currently are working on.

But it does play the scene you're currently working on. If you're on the scene. If you're in an actor, that could be from many scenes. I'd agree that pressing play when in an instance should take you to the scene the instance is on. But not if you're in a prototype, that would be unintuitive.

BigDave

yeah it occurred/appeared odd for me going through scene actors within the various scenes not archetypes.

PhilipCC

@ForumNinja said:

@Socks This also means that when you scroll all the way to the edge of a large scene and enter an actor etc, when you come back to the scene you'll be right where you left off.

That's really cool. I have two games that have scenes that are 10,752 and 19,968 wide on iPad and the last two screens in both are menus to either choose a new scene or view a promo for the other game.

Every time I work on those last two screens and change something, then Preview, I end up back at the beginning on the far left at 0:0! It was so tedious that I stopped updating both games.

When this feature is implemented I'll be able to add extra content and both games can finally be updated. Hooray!

Armelline

Last build given to testers has the remembering windows stuff, as well as a couple of other really cool little things that will be appreciated! Unfortunately I spent last night throwing bugs at them so the release probably not imminent, but it's shaping up to be a corker once they get it nailed down!

Socks

@Armelline said:
Last build given to testers has the remembering windows stuff, as well as a couple of other really cool little things that will be appreciated! Unfortunately I spent last night throwing bugs at them so the release probably not imminent, but it's shaping up to be a corker once they get it nailed down!

Sounds great ! Really looking forward to RWS™

@Armelline said:
a couple of other really cool little things that will be appreciated!

Do we get any clues !?

ForumNinja

@Socks

I believe the appreciated features he's referring to are:

• Gesture zoom (the ability to zoom in and out of the scene via pinching on your trackpad)
• A couple more preview sizes were added, 90% and 75%
• The preview size can be changed via hotkeys now (command + 1-4)
• Undo added back in (can't remember if I mentioned that one earlier)

We did have some nasty bugs pop up that we're looking into, but it's shaping up

NNterprises

@ForumNinja can you zoom in and out if you are using a mouse (aka have no trackpad). I always used to have scrolling/zoom difficulties when I have large scene sizes

As_Of_Latte

@ForumNinja Can't wait! This might be a silly thing to ask for, also if it's not too much of a hassle, but could we see a few more Android device sizes within the preview drop down selection?

I don't have, nor do I know anyone that owns an Android device. Therefore, I'm very leery on releasing my game into the Android market... Perhaps, a couple more Android preview options could help us iOS users get a better visual of what our game may look like on the more popular Android devices?

Just a thought

Socks

Thanks for the reply !

@ForumNinja said:

• Gesture zoom (the ability to zoom in and out of the scene via pinching on your trackpad)

Do you mean that we could zoom in and out of a GameSalad scene, as in - for example - zooming out to show a 8,000 x 8,000 scene on your monitor (!!!) . . . or do you mean that this is an alternative way of operating the inbuilt OS zoom (so essentially zooming into the screen pixels) but with a trackpad as opposed to the usual control + mouse method (with OSX) ?

Either one is great, the more features the better, but if it's an actual scene zoom that would be amazing !!! I've not got a track pad, but I'd buy/steal/make one if it's an actual scene zoom !!!

@ForumNinja said:

• A couple more preview sizes were added, 90% and 75%
• The preview size can be changed via hotkeys now (command + 1-4)

Sounds great, especially for people with smaller monitors / laptops, they will love this, all they'd need to do now is hit preview, then command (x) . . . great UI addition !!

Related to this . . . do you know what would also be really great, a 200% preview size so people could quality check their projects at Retina resolution.

At the moment the process is fairly laborious, you need to hit Preview, then whilst in Preview use the pulldown resolution menu to choose Edit Custom Resolution, then hit the '+' button to make a new custom resolution and enter your height and width values (for example 2048 x 1536 for a Retina iPad project), then hit the 'OK' button, then use the pulldown resolution menu again to select your new custom resolution . . . this is not at all difficult or complicated, but because the Custom Resolution panel doesn't save your settings (even if you name them), it means you have to go through this process every time you preview because all your settings are lost once you exit Preview.

When working at Retina (usually to quality check, sometimes just to play a project in all it's high-res / full-res quality), I'll often need to do this process dozens of times an hour, it would be great simply hit preview and then Command + 5 to change the preview size to 200%.

In addition to this . . . on pre-Retina iMacs (2560 x 1440), you cannot fit a full Retina iPad of pixels onto the screen, so if I want to see my whole scene at high(ish)-res, I'll use 1536 x 1152 (preview size 150%) or even 1600 x 1200.

And one final point, the utility of these large preview sizes doesn't end at being able to quality check Retina assets, they are also ideal for making game previews for the AppStore, Youtube (etc), there's a marked quality improvement when recording at higher resolution and then downsampling to something like 1024 x 768.

@ForumNinja said:

• Undo added back in (can't remember if I mentioned that one earlier)

Good stuff !

NNterprises

@As_Of_Latte

ALMOST all Androids are 16:9 aspect ratio so I pretty much always use iPhone5 view (I think iphone6 might be 16:9 but larger). The only other androids are 16:10 which would not look much different. Plus on android you are allowed to publish using Letterbox so it wont ever be stretched anyway... so I'd say go at it

Socks

@NNterprises said:
@ForumNinja can you zoom in and out if you are using a mouse (aka have no trackpad) . . .

I'm pretty sure you can use your iPhone/iPad (if you have one) as a trackpad for your Mac.

Socks

@As_Of_Latte said:
@ForumNinja Can't wait! This might be a silly thing to ask for, also if it's not too much of a hassle, but could we see a few more Android device sizes within the preview drop down selection?

Ideally if the Custom Resolution menu was fixed (it saved your custom resolutions) you could use whatever size you wanted !

Armelline

@Socks said:
In addition to this . . . on pre-Retina iMacs (2560 x 1440), you cannot fit a full Retina iPad of pixels onto the screen, so if I want to see my whole scene at high(ish)-res, I'll use 1536 x 1152 (preview size 150%) or even 1600 x 1200.

Even on my 15" Retina MacBook Pro, I can't see the whole of a standard iPad portrait window without trickery, or using a non-Apple-supported resolution. The 90% size is going to get a lot of use by me!

ForumNinja

To answer some questions:

Currently just the gesture zoom is in, but when we're done implementing the feature there should be hotkeys, maybe UI buttons, and potentially scrolling with a mouse (perhaps something along of lines of hold down the control or command key and scroll to zoom).

You won't ultimately need a trackpad, but that's what's currently in the build

There's a limit to how far you can zoom out, and on my 15-inch Macbook I can't fully see all of an 8000x8000 scene, but I can see almost all of it. Here's a screenshot of Big Top Blaster zoomed out fully (it has a width of 4000).

This is zooming specifically for the scene editor, not the built in OS zoom.

We could probably add another zoom option (i.e for 200%) pretty easily. I'll mention it to the devs.

Side note: Your custom resolutions won't disappear on each new preview, but they will go away when you close the project, so that'll save some headache.

Armelline

@ForumNinja That's awesome! I clearly didn't play around enough with the zooming! Looking forward to the next build!

AlchimiaStudios

@ForumNinja said:
To answer some questions:

Currently just the gesture zoom is in, but when we're done implementing the feature there should be hotkeys, maybe UI buttons, and potentially scrolling with a mouse (perhaps something along of lines of hold down the control or command key and scroll to zoom).

You won't ultimately need a trackpad, but that's what's currently in the build

There's a limit to how far you can zoom out, and on my 15-inch Macbook I can't fully see all of an 8000x8000 scene, but I can see almost all of it. Here's a screenshot of Big Top Blaster zoomed out fully (it has a width of 4000).

This is zooming specifically for the scene editor, not the built in OS zoom.

We could probably add another zoom option (i.e for 200%) pretty easily. I'll mention it to the devs.

Side note: Your custom resolutions won't disappear on each new preview, but they will go away when you close the project, so that'll save some headache.

Awesome! I also would love a 150% or 200% option. I would love for the custom resolutions to stick around after closing the project too, but saving per use is certainly better then per preview!