Art in one of my apps' art has changed for no reason
outlandishPIXEL
Member Posts: 43
Hi all,
Throughout development of my game Dungeon Burglars, I made sure that the pixel art used always appeared crisp on iOS both iphone and ipad. On release in September everything was fine. I made an update in Oct/Nov since then and that was also fine. I just turned it on today to find 2 problems have appeared.
Problem 1: The pixel art is extremely blurry on my iPad2 - all except the initial loading graphic. Nothing has been changed by me. On another newer iPad this looks fine. I deleted and re-downloaded to see if this would change anything and it's still blurry. I am updating my iPad2 now to see if this will help. It was designed for iPhone but I made it compatible with iPad as well, and as I said I tested it and it was absolutely working fine. I'm attempting to apply for jobs using this game as example of bug testing and this looks absolutely terrible! I haven't been using GS recently because I was waiting for multiplayer to make some headway, so if there's an obvious reason as to why a GS app would do this now, I haven't been following the forum, so please fill me in!
Problem 2: On all devices certain assets in my app have changed. For example, an image of spikes and an image of a circular saw now has a black background surrounding it instead of what I actually made. (I will attempt to find screenshots, but if you play the game you will see what I mean). I loaded up my gamesalad file to see if I had done something stupid without realising, and my assets look as they should. So at some point after publishing (because I guarantee they looked normal when published), select art assets have changed inexplicably. It's not even a case of the game using alternate art I made at some point, it's created it's own! These images simple do not exist in the game I made.
This is crazy, anyone seen this before? Sorry this is a bit of a wild rave, I'm in the middle of other things and didn't expect this to happen. Also I don't have much time to fix it the minute. I have noticed issues with gamesalad apps working fine on all devices and then being absolutely screwed up on the arcade so this isn't my first big issue with GS.
Advice would be appreciated. Thanks
oP
Dungeon Burglars: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dungeon-burglars/id913409670?ls=1&mt=8
Comments
Hey @outlandishPIXEL,
I haven't seen this and not really sure where to start to help you but was just curious. If you build an adhoc build using the same file you published, does the same thing show and happen?
Something that just popped in my head is, did you publish using the new Stable Release - Macintosh GameSalad Creator 0.12.20? The reason I ask this is because it supports Apple's 64 bit and if you didn't then that may be a cause to an issue. Just a random thought.
Good shout, I'm not certain what I used but I'll give this a shot. Thanks
Awesome, please let me know if that was the issue and best of luck!
@outlandishPIXEL Number 2: Yes I have seen this. These images are grey/black/white pixel data only i'm guessing? During the conversion process on the server it is reading the pixel data and seeing it as only greyscale and thus it tries to "optimize" it to a greyscale png (8 bit i think?), which is of course not supported by the engine itself.
A workaround is to put one pixel of color in the image and it should render correctly.
My guess is GS is using something like http://www.imagemagick.org/ on the server to handle image conversions etc. And didn't consider this possible outcome in the script.
But i've heard nothing official. Let us know if the colored pixel works.
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@AlchemiaStudios indeed they are greys, it's strange that this doesn't happen in preview or adhoc though. Also as I said, it originally worked fine when I published it. Submitting a freshly exported one as is to see if this helps anyway.
Here's a gameplay video, skip to 2:50 and you'll see the spikes have a grey background (this has now gone) and the circular saw does have a black BG but has grey sides (these have now gone). So I know I'm not going mad at least, here's the video evidence that it used to work!
The black pixel issue seems fixed with my latest update, however testing it on my iphone 4s and ipad2, it's now blurry on both of them. however it isn't on the next model iPad. I'm thinking about the different kinds of display being a factor, but as I said it used to work fine. Hmm... I assume it's because the latest version of iOS has been optimised for for newer displays and so now my pixel art has suffered because of it. I guess at least it's this way round and not newer devices that are blurry! I'd appreciate it if random people could check and tell me what device you're using and what version of iOS. It's free FYI!
Problem solved, the next update will fix all issues.