Converting Old Gamesalad project to new version??

DaneC020

I am surprised and disappointed to come back and see that gamesalad is back in a beta state. I have been preaching this engine the last few months and was going to give a little class on it for those who didnt know programming but then I found out it is back in beta. On top of that it is very slow inside of the editor when you have a few rules in place and the Window's releases aren't up to speed with the Mac versions...

The last thing to determine if it is even worth teaching this class is if I can pull up some older projects. As it is now, the current system does not recognize the old projects but it seems like I have managed to get most of it working using diff solutions on the xml files. Is there any guide in place or a converter that we can use to update older games, or are we totally out of luck?

-Dane

quantumsheep

Firstly, it's never left beta, so I'm not sure how it went 'back' to that state!

Secondly, I've had some issues with older projects of mine, but they've been fixable within half an hour, usually just a few minutes.

There's usually a rule *somewhere* that will play out different on new versions of the software. Find that, and if your logic is sound, you'll be fine.

As such, there isn't a 'converter' that I know of.

I won't comment on Windows releases as I've used them once or twice (just to try it out, really).

Cheers,

QS

DaneC020

Apparently you are correct about the beta never leaving. I checked the versioning of the XML files and seen I was in a prior version. I apologize, I would have thought after 3 years being away it would have been out of beta :P.

As for my problem, it looks like in the XML file the way images were tagged before was using a string. Now they are using an Image attribute which is causing none of my images to show up. So can I just go through and change all the attributes to the right type and it will all work? The rules and all look to be in place, just won't play or show any images for my actors.

-Dane

quantumsheep

Apparently you are correct about the beta never leaving. I checked the versioning of the XML files and seen I was in a prior version. I apologize, I would have thought after 3 years being away it would have been out of beta :P.

As for my problem, it looks like in the XML file the way images were tagged before was using a string. Now they are using an Image attribute which is causing none of my images to show up. So can I just go through and change all the attributes to the right type and it will all work? The rules and all look to be in place, just won't play or show any images for my actors.

-Dane

Ah. This might be due to the bug I have when using 'save as' - it removes all the images and sounds.

Try using an older version *with* images, go to the file, right click and choose 'show package contents'.

Do the same with the new version of your game.

Now, find the images folder in the old version and copy it into the new version.

Let us know if that works!

QS

chicop

I am experiencing the same. I wanted to pick up my game which was last opened in jan 2012. however drop down menu's, drag and drops, constraining objects to others all dont work any more. Am i looking at starting from scratch?

TheGabfather

@chicop those are some fairly basic features that I do not think should be heavily impacted by the newer releases. Having said that, without knowing the Rules you made for each function it would be impossible to tell where the problem lies.

But, no need to show them -- I will just tell you to reread quantumsheep's 1st reply to the OP. When Rules become fuzzy when jumping from one version to another, chances are the changes you have to make are only minuscule and can be tackled in minutes.

..On the other hand, if I had a project that old I would actually enjoy redoing everything a ton of tricks have been discussed in the forums since Jan 2012 and you might want to try implementing them for a more optimised game.

chicop

Ah cheers Gabfather for your response, I've thought about starting over but it's not an easy thing for me time wise but also coding wise. In the end it might be better though... Lets see if fixing it works out first

DaneC020

So I am back at this since I have free time to mess with it again. So I got all the files and rules showing up by manually changing the actor.xml files. I had to replace the attribute on all the images to . Then I had to strip all extensions in the actor files as it seems that was changed in the newer version as well.

So everything is showing up but when I hit play, it says"The game project files could not be found." I'll dig around and hopefully find a fix soon.

-Dane

DaneC020

So I pulled out my old mac laptop and tried opening the files on there... The original file opened without a problem and I didn't have to do any of this conversion mess... I figured I would try that out since I was having a hard time finding any project settings under the PC client. After looking at the Mac client, it looks like the PC client is very far from being complete?

Anyhow, if anyone is having some of the same issues, just get someone with a Mac to open the project up for you and have them re-save it out. Such a shame I wasted all this time, but at least it is working and I know to not use the PC client.

-Dane