@Socks said:Windows losing their position / state when you shift focus - example navigate to layers, scroll down to the layer you want, open that layer, scroll to the actor you want to investigate, double click - you are taken to that actor . . whoops, wrong actor, go back . . oh, you can't go back to layers, so click on scene again, then layers . . oh, look everything is closed back up . . scroll down to the layer you want, open that layer, scroll to the actor you want to investigate, double click . . .etc etc . . repeat 140 times over the course of a day = : (
That one definitely one of the most annoying thing for creator. It's just terribad designing that after every little tweak to instance actor or something else we are forced to find same place again. And that's especially true in big projects.
I've not seen the codebase, I'm speaking as a GameSalad user rather than a programmer.
Like I say in my post some of these issues must (?) be fairly simple to address, for example, I can't see how the codebase would tie GameSalad into making the default text colour white or the maximum size 99 or the asset window background white, surely these are just aesthetic choices made by someone at GameSalad ?
And if we can tab between fields in an actor's attributes, then why could be not tab between fields in a behaviour ? It seems the ability to tab between fields exists in the software ?
(although I except I could be wrong and the codebase is the limitation here ?)
And even if it were the codebase, then issues that have effected GameSalad for months or even years can still not reasonably be called 'problem of the day', I don't think it's unreasonable to raise issues that have existed for months or years.
Can we also get HTML5 export for our games/apps without having to go through embedding via the arcade? That together with Windows .exe files would be perfect!
@Socks said:
And even if it were the codebase, then issues that have effected GameSalad for months or even years can still not reasonably be called 'problem of the day', I don't think it's unreasonable to raise issues that have existed for months or years.
I agree with you, some of those aesthetic changes i think would be easy to fix, but because of that I think they are often overlooked. I would absolutly KILL for the leaderboad/achievement notification to show up in the notification window instead of the process interrupting method it does now. I think GS tends to favor the big changes instead of the small ones. That being said, based on what we have been told, and more by what we have seen over the years, i would not be surprised if something like changing the default color of the text to black is something that so deep in the code they don't want to touch it. It could also just be something so minor it gets over looked.
I handle a legacy project here at work. it had over 20k lines of code, 8k of which were a single function. I wanted to change the way a function worked, and no joke, it was in there 5 times, once each time it was called, and each time it was written differently. It ultimately took me 6 months to rewrite the entire project from scratch so I could move forward with my new features. It suuuuuucked.
I can only assume some of those minor improvements are in the bug database? Maybe it's time for another round of voting because i think most of us still have votes tied up in those projects they have already completed (like gamepads).
@vonhank said:
I agree with you, some of those aesthetic changes i think would be easy to fix, but because of that I think they are often overlooked.
Agreed, people have been flagging up these issues for years but they are never addressed (I'm assuming they are easy to address).
@vonhank said:
I think GS tends to favor the big changes instead of the small ones.
I have a theory, it may as well be a conspiracy theory as it's entirely unevidenced : ) it's just a hunch - and that is programmers in general tend to favour neat code tricks that exercise their talents rather than code that produces basic utility, by that I mean which would be easier to implement, a menu that pops up listing all the options, or a neat little scrollable window with drop down menus and subsections and little animated light that flashes as you make your selection ? I'd guess it would be the simple menu (and it really is only a guess), so my theory is that there may be a natural inclination to make things a little more involved than perhaps they need to be.
This is what I imagine is happening when I open the attribute browser. There are twelve default attributes, yet for some odd reason someone at some stage has decided to only show you 7 and hide the other 5, to access the other 5 you must first scroll down, or open out the window, no big at all, just the flick of your finger, or the drag of a mouse, but as I've said earlier all these extra clicks and scrolls and back buttons and forward buttons (etc) soon add up once repeated several hundred times a week, and like elsewhere opening out the attribute browser to a more useful size so you can more easily navigate it is a short lived joy because as soon as you do something else and then return it has closed back up to its default state . . . why not a simple menu with all 12 attributes visible . . . the issue, as trivial as it is, becomes worse when you start to add your own custom attributes.
I can think of no other reason why this needs to be like this other than it being an aesthetic choice, a preference, it looked neat and was more of a coding challenge that just a simply list ? Maybe this is related to the idea that GS prefer big changes to small ones, it just might not hold any appeal to go around tidying up all these issues when you could be doing something a little more challenging/interesting ?
@vonhank said:
That being said, based on what we have been told, and more by what we have seen over the years, i would not be surprised if something like changing the default color of the text to black is something that so deep in the code they don't want to touch it. It could also just be something so minor it gets over looked.
Well, I'm in the same position, I can only really go on hunches and guesses, I would have thought that the default text colour would be stored as a 32 bit number (24/8), so the task would involve changing that number from 255, 255, 255 / 255 to some other 32 bit number ?
Of course it may also be the case that the task is easy, but GameSalad have chosen not to do it for other reasons.
@vonhank said:
I handle a legacy project here at work. it had over 20k lines of code, 8k of which were a single function. I wanted to change the way a function worked, and no joke, it was in there 5 times, once each time it was called, and each time it was written differently. It ultimately took me 6 months to rewrite the entire project from scratch so I could move forward with my new features. It suuuuuucked.
Damn ! !!
@vonhank said:
I can only assume some of those minor improvements are in the bug database? Maybe it's time for another round of voting because i think most of us still have votes tied up in those projects they have already completed (like gamepads).
Who knows, certainly not me, I think you have to be a paid member to vote, I'm sure I'll be a paid member again soon, my Pro ran out a long while back - besides the gamepad feature (which was a personal project for BlackCloakGS) are you aware of any feature/improvement that has been requested through the bug database that has ever happened ? I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've not personally seen or am aware of any.
@Socks said:
Who knows, certainly not me, I think you have to be a paid member to vote, I'm sure I'll be a paid member again soon, my Pro ran out a long while back - besides the gamepad feature (which was a personal project for BlackCloakGS) are you aware of any feature/improvement that has been requested through the bug database that has ever happened ? I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've not personally seen or am aware of any.
There are a bunch that have been tagged for v14 and v15.... custom fonts, admob, android expansion files, custom polygon collisions. cool stuff. I know back in December they said they would start going through the feature requests according to popularity. when will they come? hopefully sooner than later, but i'd like them to first fix the memory leaks.
I'll take a look through the database and add them in, at least then they will be tracked
@Socks said:
I have a theory, it may as well be a conspiracy theory as it's entirely unevidenced : ) it's just a hunch - and that is programmers in general tend to favour neat code tricks that exercise their talents rather than code that produces basic utility, by that I mean which would be easier to implement, a menu that pops up listing all the options, or a neat little scrollable window with drop down menus and subsections and little animated light that flashes as you make your selection ? I'd guess it would be the simple menu (and it really is only a guess), so my theory is that there may be a natural inclination to make things a little more involved than perhaps they need to be.
I know personally, if I had to go find and rewrite a (basically) working section of code, or go write a new function, I'd prefer the new function any day, especially when those new functions are cool. I think that the small bugs should be rounded up and take a few out to pasture with every nightly.
@BlackCloakGS - I just wanted to thank you for the Game Controller support in GameSalad. I have not had so much FUN with GameSalad in a long long time. I have converted 3 of my apps so far and they look great on my TV.
For those that are experiencing issues can't they just go back and load a previous stable build if they are not developing for Fire TV at this time?
We hear you guys that there are performance issue with creator in Yosemite. This is due to Apple changing the way garbage collection works, which is something that happens deep inside the OS code and has caused major performance issue with any apps using the Garbage Collector (GC), including Creator.
Our code base was written long before Apple’s new memory technology (ARC) and uses the legacy GC system. Apple has chosen to forgo improvements to GC performance and thus we must now move our legacy code to the new memory model.
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
@BobD said:
For those that are experiencing issues can't they just go back and load a previous stable build if they are not developing for Fire TV at this time?
Which build is truly "stable" Every build seems to have some quirks. Gamesalad is just a quirky engine. Sometimes you get more from one build then another but they all have little issues.
@BlackCloakGS said:
We hear you guys that there are performance issue with creator in Yosemite. This is due to Apple changing the way garbage collection works, which is something that happens deep inside the OS code and has caused major performance issue with any apps using the Garbage Collector (GC), including Creator.
Our code base was written long before Apple’s new memory technology (ARC) and uses the legacy GC system. Apple has chosen to forgo improvements to GC performance and thus we must now move our legacy code to the new memory model.
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
Awesome, take your time. People will complain about X feature or Y feature, but a well performing engine will ultimately be best.
@BlackCloakGS ...the performance issues are NOT just with Yosemite.
Im running on Mavericks, and still experiencing the very noticeable performance issues introduced in the latest Stable release of the creator that are making it almost unusable compared to previous releases.
@BlackCloakGS said:
We hear you guys that there are performance issue with creator in Yosemite. This is due to Apple changing the way garbage collection works, which is something that happens deep inside the OS code and has caused major performance issue with any apps using the Garbage Collector (GC), including Creator.
Our code base was written long before Apple’s new memory technology (ARC) and uses the legacy GC system. Apple has chosen to forgo improvements to GC performance and thus we must now move our legacy code to the new memory model.
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
mmm but...
0.12.10 -> Really slow on Yosemite
0.12.20 -> Quite good on Yosemite
0.13.6 -> Really slow on Yosemite
how is it possible? one step forward, two steps back...
0.12.10 -> Really slow on Yosemite
0.12.20 -> Quite good on Yosemite
0.13.6 -> Really slow on Yosemite
how is it possible? one step forward, two steps back...
That list is almost completely opposite for me. And none of them are "quite good". Yosemite isn't the only OS in use, nor is performance going to be the same for every person/project. Anecdotal experience from one person alone doesn't do much.
ARC is an entirely different way of managing memory then a Garabage Collector, which is what all versions on Gs have been using.
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
I can understand perfectly well why you guys have wanted to try low-impact approaches, but i guess it's fairly clear now that it's not fixing the problem. I personally encourage to put road map on hold and concentrate fixing this problem. For me and many others smoothly working tool is way more important than clumsy tool with new stuff in it. Honestly i would personally take some programmers off from Graphene to help GS team to get this tool back on shape. After that you can go back to your new baby
@BlackCloakGS said:
We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
Excellent! I for one am 1000% happy to wait a few weeks with 0 additional features added or other items fixed if it means this one gets sorted out properly.
I'll second what @Chunkypixels said, though - this issue predates the release of Yosemite, and Apple GC change, though it did get a lot worse when installing Yosemite.
And I agree completely with @vonhank - this is something that's got so bad now that it has the potential to destroy GameSalad's reputation. I'd fully support throwing every resource at it that will help, even if that means Graphene and Windows devs.
And as @BobD said - awesome work on the controller support. I know it was a labour of love and it's clearly been extremely well received! Hell I even bought a Fire TV to play with it! (Though not had the chance yet )
@BobD said:
For those that are experiencing issues can't they just go back and load a previous stable build if they are not developing for Fire TV at this time?
I honestly can't remember the last version that didn't have this issue. Some have been better than others, but it's been a major issue for at least a year now. There are definitely no links available to issue free versions on the GS website.
Thank you for the update on this! I was having a bit of a lag problem a few days ago and though hmm maybe I just need to update my computer to Yosemite. Wrong. Now, GameSalad completely freezes my whole computer and I can't edit anything.
Comments
True, but you can hardly call issues that have effected GameSalad for months or even years 'problem of the day' !
have you seen the codebase
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That one definitely one of the most annoying thing for creator. It's just terribad designing that after every little tweak to instance actor or something else we are forced to find same place again. And that's especially true in big projects.
I've not seen the codebase, I'm speaking as a GameSalad user rather than a programmer.
Like I say in my post some of these issues must (?) be fairly simple to address, for example, I can't see how the codebase would tie GameSalad into making the default text colour white or the maximum size 99 or the asset window background white, surely these are just aesthetic choices made by someone at GameSalad ?
And if we can tab between fields in an actor's attributes, then why could be not tab between fields in a behaviour ? It seems the ability to tab between fields exists in the software ?
(although I except I could be wrong and the codebase is the limitation here ?)
And even if it were the codebase, then issues that have effected GameSalad for months or even years can still not reasonably be called 'problem of the day', I don't think it's unreasonable to raise issues that have existed for months or years.
Same here, 12.20 seemed to be way better in that department. 13.x literally lasts 5 minutes
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una
Can we also get HTML5 export for our games/apps without having to go through embedding via the arcade? That together with Windows .exe files would be perfect!
Thanks for your hard work!
I agree with you, some of those aesthetic changes i think would be easy to fix, but because of that I think they are often overlooked. I would absolutly KILL for the leaderboad/achievement notification to show up in the notification window instead of the process interrupting method it does now. I think GS tends to favor the big changes instead of the small ones. That being said, based on what we have been told, and more by what we have seen over the years, i would not be surprised if something like changing the default color of the text to black is something that so deep in the code they don't want to touch it. It could also just be something so minor it gets over looked.
I handle a legacy project here at work. it had over 20k lines of code, 8k of which were a single function. I wanted to change the way a function worked, and no joke, it was in there 5 times, once each time it was called, and each time it was written differently. It ultimately took me 6 months to rewrite the entire project from scratch so I could move forward with my new features. It suuuuuucked.
I can only assume some of those minor improvements are in the bug database? Maybe it's time for another round of voting because i think most of us still have votes tied up in those projects they have already completed (like gamepads).
Send and Receive Data using your own Server Tutorial! | Vote for A Long Way Home on Steam Greenlight! | Ten Years Left
Agreed, people have been flagging up these issues for years but they are never addressed (I'm assuming they are easy to address).
I have a theory, it may as well be a conspiracy theory as it's entirely unevidenced : ) it's just a hunch - and that is programmers in general tend to favour neat code tricks that exercise their talents rather than code that produces basic utility, by that I mean which would be easier to implement, a menu that pops up listing all the options, or a neat little scrollable window with drop down menus and subsections and little animated light that flashes as you make your selection ? I'd guess it would be the simple menu (and it really is only a guess), so my theory is that there may be a natural inclination to make things a little more involved than perhaps they need to be.
This is what I imagine is happening when I open the attribute browser. There are twelve default attributes, yet for some odd reason someone at some stage has decided to only show you 7 and hide the other 5, to access the other 5 you must first scroll down, or open out the window, no big at all, just the flick of your finger, or the drag of a mouse, but as I've said earlier all these extra clicks and scrolls and back buttons and forward buttons (etc) soon add up once repeated several hundred times a week, and like elsewhere opening out the attribute browser to a more useful size so you can more easily navigate it is a short lived joy because as soon as you do something else and then return it has closed back up to its default state . . . why not a simple menu with all 12 attributes visible . . . the issue, as trivial as it is, becomes worse when you start to add your own custom attributes.
I can think of no other reason why this needs to be like this other than it being an aesthetic choice, a preference, it looked neat and was more of a coding challenge that just a simply list ? Maybe this is related to the idea that GS prefer big changes to small ones, it just might not hold any appeal to go around tidying up all these issues when you could be doing something a little more challenging/interesting ?
Well, I'm in the same position, I can only really go on hunches and guesses, I would have thought that the default text colour would be stored as a 32 bit number (24/8), so the task would involve changing that number from 255, 255, 255 / 255 to some other 32 bit number ?
Of course it may also be the case that the task is easy, but GameSalad have chosen not to do it for other reasons.
Damn !
!!
Who knows, certainly not me, I think you have to be a paid member to vote, I'm sure I'll be a paid member again soon, my Pro ran out a long while back - besides the gamepad feature (which was a personal project for BlackCloakGS) are you aware of any feature/improvement that has been requested through the bug database that has ever happened ? I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've not personally seen or am aware of any.
There are a bunch that have been tagged for v14 and v15.... custom fonts, admob, android expansion files, custom polygon collisions. cool stuff. I know back in December they said they would start going through the feature requests according to popularity. when will they come? hopefully sooner than later, but i'd like them to first fix the memory leaks.
I'll take a look through the database and add them in, at least then they will be tracked
I know personally, if I had to go find and rewrite a (basically) working section of code, or go write a new function, I'd prefer the new function any day, especially when those new functions are cool. I think that the small bugs should be rounded up and take a few out to pasture with every nightly.
Send and Receive Data using your own Server Tutorial! | Vote for A Long Way Home on Steam Greenlight! | Ten Years Left
@BlackCloakGS - I just wanted to thank you for the Game Controller support in GameSalad. I have not had so much FUN with GameSalad in a long long time. I have converted 3 of my apps so far and they look great on my TV.
For those that are experiencing issues can't they just go back and load a previous stable build if they are not developing for Fire TV at this time?
We hear you guys that there are performance issue with creator in Yosemite. This is due to Apple changing the way garbage collection works, which is something that happens deep inside the OS code and has caused major performance issue with any apps using the Garbage Collector (GC), including Creator.
Our code base was written long before Apple’s new memory technology (ARC) and uses the legacy GC system. Apple has chosen to forgo improvements to GC performance and thus we must now move our legacy code to the new memory model.
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
Which build is truly "stable"
Every build seems to have some quirks. Gamesalad is just a quirky engine. Sometimes you get more from one build then another but they all have little issues.
Follow us: Twitter - Website
Awesome, take your time. People will complain about X feature or Y feature, but a well performing engine will ultimately be best.
Follow us: Twitter - Website
@BlackCloakGS ...the performance issues are NOT just with Yosemite.
Im running on Mavericks, and still experiencing the very noticeable performance issues introduced in the latest Stable release of the creator that are making it almost unusable compared to previous releases.
Moving to ARC will help out everyone not just user on Yosemite.
mmm but...
0.12.10 -> Really slow on Yosemite
0.12.20 -> Quite good on Yosemite
0.13.6 -> Really slow on Yosemite
how is it possible? one step forward, two steps back...
Will admob work on all android stores and give you Revenue, or is it like chartboost and revmob....only on googleplay appstore and amazon.
Homepage: freneticgamez.eu/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FreneticGamez
Here comes the answer:
That list is almost completely opposite for me. And none of them are "quite good". Yosemite isn't the only OS in use, nor is performance going to be the same for every person/project. Anecdotal experience from one person alone doesn't do much.
ARC is an entirely different way of managing memory then a Garabage Collector, which is what all versions on Gs have been using.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Reference_Counting
Follow us: Twitter - Website
We have been trying low-impact approaches to resolve this in parallel with our existing roadmap plan so as not to have to put the road map on hold for two week or more, but those have not worked out as hoped (obviously!). We are now preparing a larger refactoring that will could take several weeks. This is not a trivial task and will take some time. Please be patient as we work through this issue.
I can understand perfectly well why you guys have wanted to try low-impact approaches, but i guess it's fairly clear now that it's not fixing the problem. I personally encourage to put road map on hold and concentrate fixing this problem. For me and many others smoothly working tool is way more important than clumsy tool with new stuff in it. Honestly i would personally take some programmers off from Graphene to help GS team to get this tool back on shape. After that you can go back to your new baby
Excellent! I for one am 1000% happy to wait a few weeks with 0 additional features added or other items fixed if it means this one gets sorted out properly.
I'll second what @Chunkypixels said, though - this issue predates the release of Yosemite, and Apple GC change, though it did get a lot worse when installing Yosemite.
And I agree completely with @vonhank - this is something that's got so bad now that it has the potential to destroy GameSalad's reputation. I'd fully support throwing every resource at it that will help, even if that means Graphene and Windows devs.
And as @BobD said - awesome work on the controller support. I know it was a labour of love and it's clearly been extremely well received! Hell I even bought a Fire TV to play with it! (Though not had the chance yet
)
I honestly can't remember the last version that didn't have this issue. Some have been better than others, but it's been a major issue for at least a year now. There are definitely no links available to issue free versions on the GS website.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
It feels like when I first used GS. 'Save as' before you hit Preview and Quit every 15 mins.
I heard Apple is basically forcing all devs to move to ARC. Apparently, It improves performance quite a bit.
Take your time. Looking forward to it.
Thank you for the update on this! I was having a bit of a lag problem a few days ago and though hmm maybe I just need to update my computer to Yosemite. Wrong. Now, GameSalad completely freezes my whole computer and I can't edit anything.