adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
edited March 2018
Putting in some more aggressive bot filtering and we just pushed an update to auth that should be a bit more efficient! Gonna keep an eye on things for a bit.
You're lucky I decided to watch Spider-man: Homecoming and all the extras tonight or I'd be a sleep right now!
Just signed up last night for Gamesalad trial. Very excited to dig in and get started. Unfortunately, I have been getting the same 502 url error for any link to learn.gamesalad.com that I can find. Very difficult to evaluate the trial if I cannot find instructions on how to use it. Please help. Thank you.
PhilipCCEncounter Bay, South AustraliaMemberPosts: 1,390
edited March 2018
@ryanherter and @fadderall
Being the weekend in the USA, if the server has problems it probably won't get fixed until Monday.
Start with the Cookbook (Mac or Windows) under the Help menu for the time being. Plenty to learn there.
As @Hymloe pointed out, I’d also like to stress that the size/collision in HTML, as well as the pitch/positional sound and text issues should not be treated as bugs but as basic features that any game engine needs fundamentally, these can not be put aside.
@adent42 I know you’re doing what you can and the web version is moving forward…. but but but
@adent42 Behaviors
Behaviors have been ported. I'm not gonna list them.
Because they're all there!
@adent42 you're frightening me!
Merely having sound does not constitute sound functionality if pitch or positional sound are not implemented and lost at import.
An average game has 150+ sounds all pitched mixed and layered with different values as they should be….without pitch, half of these sounds are useless, feel and experience is crippled and games fall apart.
@adent42 Font rendering might not be fixable. The resize I looked at it a few years ago >but couldn't find a source of the problem
As you can imagine, large text can be everywhere in a game and a huge component of the experience.
Entire UI with pages of dynamic, carefully crafted, positioned and animated text cards, not rendering correctly is just not possible…..
Last but certainly not least, Size change and collision are used in everything, in so many games and is a must!
Surely, you guys don’t think of actually superseding the creator with the online tool without these fundamental issues fixed??!?!?!!!!!!!!
This would be a total and absolute betray of your promise of feature parity before retiring the creator.
As @Hymloe pointed out, I’d also like to stress that the size/collision in HTML, as well as the pitch/positional sound and text issues should not be treated as bugs but as basic features that any game engine needs fundamentally, these can not be put aside.
@adent42 I know you’re doing what you can and the web version is moving forward…. but but but
@adent42 Behaviors
Behaviors have been ported. I'm not gonna list them.
Because they're all there!
@adent42 you're frightening me!
Merely having sound does not constitute sound functionality if pitch or positional sound are not implemented and lost at import.
An average game has 150+ sounds all pitched mixed and layered with different values as they should be….without pitch, half of these sounds are useless, feel and experience is crippled and games fall apart.
@adent42 Font rendering might not be fixable. The resize I looked at it a few years ago >but couldn't find a source of the problem
As you can imagine, large text can be everywhere in a game and a huge component of the experience.
Entire UI with pages of dynamic, carefully crafted, positioned and animated text cards, not rendering correctly is just not possible…..
Last but certainly not least, Size change and collision are used in everything, in so many games and is a must!
Surely, you guys don’t think of actually superseding the creator with the online tool without these fundamental issues fixed??!?!?!!!!!!!!
This would be a total and absolute betray of your promise of feature parity before retiring the creator.
Good to see other users ticking AGREE on this post, and acknowledging these fundamental issues.
Most of the HTML5 output system is working pretty great, but without the SOUND, COLLISIONS and TEXT working properly, there are some major limitations with what can be done with it.
I would love to see these things addressed in a solid little working bee from Game Salad staff to really do the HTML5 output proud.
Have to say, the web creator has reached a point where I'd seriously consider switching to it. However, the HTML5 preview of projects is always so underwhelming compared to the native preview. That's what holds me back. Some projects would work just fine, but any serious project is too much for the HTML5 preview.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
@Hymloe , I didn't mean to dismiss the issue, just making sure if someone on the outside reading didn't think "doh, HTML5 won't play sound at all", which is what I think when I hear "sound doesn't work". That was an issue in the past with different sound file formats not working on different browsers, so I wanted to make sure people who didn't need the extended sound features to know that sound at least plays!
But yah, it sucks that the engine doesn't do positional sound /pitch in HTML5.
For people who were curious, we didn't support it initially because those weren't capabilities that HTML5 had at the time and spending extra processing on audio in javascript would definitely slow the engine down. In the native engine, we have the benefits of using OpenAL to handle audio, something we can't easily port to HTML5. A few years after the engine came out, HTML5 finally did add advanced audio features, but we never got around to putting them in, since we were prioritizing the native engine.
For large text rendering issues, the reason that might not be fixing quickly is that we actually hit a technical limit of HTML5's texture sizes. Basically, we have trouble rendering some larger text because we can't make textures that big (or at least as big on mobile). We did do some work on the text rendering to fix some artifacts that showed up on rendering cursive and serifed fonts though, so we're not just leaving it alone. Since text display is the easiest to work around (pre-render the text), that's probably the last one we'll fix of the 3 issue you mention, but it's definitely something that will get another look.
For the collision thing, we literally ripped out Box2D and replaced it with a different version to try to fix the issue, but to no avail. I think we finally have a lead on the issue though, as we found a different collision bug that sort of indicates what's going on with the resizing bug! (if you're curious, for custom collisions, in HTML5, if you put the Collision behavior on one of the actors, then collisions don't work. But if you put it on the other actor you want to collide with, it does). That particular bug gives as a different thread to pull on that might help us figure out what's going on.
In terms of priorities, I'm probably gonna take another look into the collision thing before the other two bugs (mostly because will likely affect more people and there's no way to work around it).
In other updates, we THINK we have a solution to the Chartboost issues, which means we should be releasing some iOS engine updates soon crosses fingers. In case you were curious, we were running into a bug that would cause the app to freeze in a deadlock if you dismissed a Chartboost video ad early.
So if testing pans out, the next release should have the following:
Fix issues with insensitive touch areas around the edge of the screen on iOS11 (maybe iOS10).
Autohide home indicator on iPhone X.
Update Tapdaq SDK to 6.0.1
Update Chartboost SDK to 7.1.2
AdMob ads dynamically resizes to to avoid edge curves on iPhone X
Remove old ad network code (doesn't affect most people functionally, but does lighten the binary a bit).
Thanks for the extra info on those issues @adent42 ...
One thought on those tricky issues for HTML5 is to perhaps just come up with the best solution possible to mitigate the problem, even if it's not a proper solution.
Obviously these issues are going to affect everyone differently, seeing everyone's project is different, but from my perspective, a few ideas...
POSITIONAL / PITCHED SOUND
From what you've said, these things can now be put in, due to more features being available for HTML5 audio. So I guess these things can be done properly. Great. Is this just a matter of time, for someone to implement it? Nothing else blocking progress on that?
COLLISIONS
For me, this issue isn't about custom collision shapes. It's just about normal square and sphere collision shapes, and the fact that - if an actor changes size, the collision shape doesn't update to match that size.
Would it be possible to detect any change in the actor's width or height, and if they change, update the size of the collider (or destroy and recreate the collider altogether on any frame that the actor has changed size)?
Another hacky solution to your custom colliders problem (again, I've never used custom colliders, so I wouldn't know about it, and I don't personally care about it), could you, for HTML5 output only, just force those to be a sphere collider, or box collider instead, so that at least it kinda works for now?
TEXT RENDERING
Where larger fonts look corrupted on HTML5, I wonder whether you could hack in a solution for now that just cap how large the textures can be, and just "blow them up larger" where needed.
Just some ideas.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
Sounds, yep, it's just a matter of time and priority.
Text rendering, the solution I think we need is to figure out if we need to use multiple textures for larger text and do that. I need to check the native engine and see what changes we made and match those.
For collision shapes, we are updating the collision shapes for resize just as in the native engine, but the system isn't registering the change. The code is almost exactly the same as in the native engine. The first time we tried to debug this issue, I think it was actually resizing the collision box, but it wouldn't stop the existing collision. So if you were colliding and resized, it would keep colliding on the old shape. But if you resized and then collided, it would see the new shape / size. Since the custom collision shapes aren't registering correctly either, I think it's something to do with the system that communicates collisions to Box2D in general, hence why the new bug might give me a different angle of attack.
Sounds, yep, it's just a matter of time and priority.
Text rendering, the solution I think we need is to figure out if we need to use multiple textures for larger text and do that. I need to check the native engine and see what changes we made and match those.
For collision shapes, we are updating the collision shapes for resize just as in the native engine, but the system isn't registering the change. The code is almost exactly the same as in the native engine. The first time we tried to debug this issue, I think it was actually resizing the collision box, but it wouldn't stop the existing collision. So if you were colliding and resized, it would keep colliding on the old shape. But if you resized and then collided, it would see the new shape / size. Since the custom collision shapes aren't registering correctly either, I think it's something to do with the system that communicates collisions to Box2D in general, hence why the new bug might give me a different angle of attack.
Cool, thanks for the news and thoughts on each point.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
@unbeatenpixel the app doesn't specifically tell the OS it wants hiding so I think it takes longer. I only notices because I was trying to debug the touch issue and was wondering why the home bar stayed their so long.
@jr2520 said: @adent42 I've submitted 2 tickets on your "Pro User Gamesalad Support" days ago and still have not received anything indicating my tickets were even received. I've been using GameSalad for years and continually pay your $30/mo so I'm bewildered on why I cannot get in touch with support.
I can look at your ticket; I looked earlier but didn't see it. Maybe it got put somewhere and I missed it. Sorry for the delay!
@Braydon_SFX@adent42 Still looking for the ticket? I can submit another one if you guys would like since you ignored my comment.
Braydon_SFXMember, Sous Chef, Bowlboy SidekickPosts: 9,273
@jr2520 said: @adent42 I've submitted 2 tickets on your "Pro User Gamesalad Support" days ago and still have not received anything indicating my tickets were even received. I've been using GameSalad for years and continually pay your $30/mo so I'm bewildered on why I cannot get in touch with support.
I can look at your ticket; I looked earlier but didn't see it. Maybe it got put somewhere and I missed it. Sorry for the delay!
@Braydon_SFX@adent42 Still looking for the ticket? I can submit another one if you guys would like since you ignored my comment.
Had found your ticket and someone from our team replied. You said it was resolved, but perhaps this is for a different issue? Feel free to PM me personally and I'll get you straightened out.
@jr2520 said: @adent42 I've submitted 2 tickets on your "Pro User Gamesalad Support" days ago and still have not received anything indicating my tickets were even received. I've been using GameSalad for years and continually pay your $30/mo so I'm bewildered on why I cannot get in touch with support.
I can look at your ticket; I looked earlier but didn't see it. Maybe it got put somewhere and I missed it. Sorry for the delay!
@Braydon_SFX@adent42 Still looking for the ticket? I can submit another one if you guys would like since you ignored my comment.
Had found your ticket and someone from our team replied. You said it was resolved, but perhaps this is for a different issue? Feel free to PM me personally and I'll get you straightened out.
Don't recall a response from GameSalad at all.. Would be happy to PM you
@adent42 - the click issues are also a problem on newer android devices.
Is the fix also working on android?
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
@Zwire I haven't looked into it yet. I'm shooting to get the new iOS build out this weekend and then start looking at android next week. If you haven't yet, could you send to @ForumNinja the OS version and device model? Actually, if anyone else sees this problem, do the same!
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
Took me long enough.
If you look on publishing, you'll now see a "Experimental Build" button next to generate.
This will, from now until we get tired of supporting it, generate using whatever new features we have available.
In this case, for iOS it will build with the new updates for iPhone X, and updated Chartboost and Tapdaq SDKs (as outlined above). If, in a couple of days, I don't hear about any new bugs, then I'll push it up as the default build and remove the "Experimental Build" button until next time.
Hello ! I have a random quiz game in my current learning application , but there's a problem that I've been trying to solve for about 2 months but still I can't find any fix. The problem is that the removed row in the quiz didn't comeback or restored when I tried to restart the quiz (not the reset game function) . When i reset the quiz with the functions of resetting the question answered and score , the questions and answer will disappear and can't take the quiz again . Please I badly need help. need to solve this problem within 2 days. I wait for a reply here or better email me here : renzbayas16@gmail.com. Please help me @adent42@jr2520
@renzbayas16 said:
Hello ! I have a random quiz game in my current learning application , but there's a problem that I've been trying to solve for about 2 months but still I can't find any fix. The problem is that the removed row in the quiz didn't comeback or restored when I tried to restart the quiz (not the reset game function) . When i reset the quiz with the functions of resetting the question answered and score , the questions and answer will disappear and can't take the quiz again . Please I badly need help. need to solve this problem within 2 days. I wait for a reply here or better email me here : renzbayas16@gmail.com. Please help me
If you're removing the questions from the table, when you want to restart the quiz you'll need to "refill" the table. Normally people do this by making a second table with the questions in, and copying that to the table you're using at the start of the game using the Copy Table function.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
edited April 2018
Okay... looks like the icon server was stuck. One day, I'm gonna have to reverse engineer that assets bundle format so we don't have one extra random Mac server sitting around packaging icons (and occasionally failing).
It may take a bit to catch up as we work through the queue of publishes.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,170
Yah, try again. I rebooted the server. Something is hitting our server hard a lot recently, but since it hits it in such a way that logs stop working, I'm still trying to figure out how to check what's happening.
Comments
Thanks. Much appreciated.
Putting in some more aggressive bot filtering and we just pushed an update to auth that should be a bit more efficient! Gonna keep an eye on things for a bit.
You're lucky I decided to watch Spider-man: Homecoming and all the extras tonight or I'd be a sleep right now!
I get the 502 page on tutorials
Just signed up last night for Gamesalad trial. Very excited to dig in and get started. Unfortunately, I have been getting the same 502 url error for any link to learn.gamesalad.com that I can find. Very difficult to evaluate the trial if I cannot find instructions on how to use it. Please help. Thank you.
@ryanherter and @fadderall
Being the weekend in the USA, if the server has problems it probably won't get fixed until Monday.
Start with the Cookbook (Mac or Windows) under the Help menu for the time being. Plenty to learn there.
@fadderall, there are lots of great tutorials on line as well. I have a bunch at the sites linked in my signature below if you want to check them out.
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
Like all of you, I have many issues with GS, but i’ll just post one at a time to avoid my trademark pamphlet style.
HTML BUGS:
@adent42
As @Hymloe pointed out, I’d also like to stress that the size/collision in HTML, as well as the pitch/positional sound and text issues should not be treated as bugs but as basic features that any game engine needs fundamentally, these can not be put aside.
@adent42 I know you’re doing what you can and the web version is moving forward…. but but but
No, they are not if they are not all functional.
@adent42 you're frightening me!
Merely having sound does not constitute sound functionality if pitch or positional sound are not implemented and lost at import.
An average game has 150+ sounds all pitched mixed and layered with different values as they should be….without pitch, half of these sounds are useless, feel and experience is crippled and games fall apart.
As you can imagine, large text can be everywhere in a game and a huge component of the experience.
Entire UI with pages of dynamic, carefully crafted, positioned and animated text cards, not rendering correctly is just not possible…..
Last but certainly not least, Size change and collision are used in everything, in so many games and is a must!
Surely, you guys don’t think of actually superseding the creator with the online tool without these fundamental issues fixed??!?!?!!!!!!!!
This would be a total and absolute betray of your promise of feature parity before retiring the creator.
Good to see other users ticking AGREE on this post, and acknowledging these fundamental issues.
Most of the HTML5 output system is working pretty great, but without the SOUND, COLLISIONS and TEXT working properly, there are some major limitations with what can be done with it.
I would love to see these things addressed in a solid little working bee from Game Salad staff to really do the HTML5 output proud.
Have to say, the web creator has reached a point where I'd seriously consider switching to it. However, the HTML5 preview of projects is always so underwhelming compared to the native preview. That's what holds me back. Some projects would work just fine, but any serious project is too much for the HTML5 preview.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Hymloe , I didn't mean to dismiss the issue, just making sure if someone on the outside reading didn't think "doh, HTML5 won't play sound at all", which is what I think when I hear "sound doesn't work". That was an issue in the past with different sound file formats not working on different browsers, so I wanted to make sure people who didn't need the extended sound features to know that sound at least plays!
But yah, it sucks that the engine doesn't do positional sound /pitch in HTML5.
For people who were curious, we didn't support it initially because those weren't capabilities that HTML5 had at the time and spending extra processing on audio in javascript would definitely slow the engine down. In the native engine, we have the benefits of using OpenAL to handle audio, something we can't easily port to HTML5. A few years after the engine came out, HTML5 finally did add advanced audio features, but we never got around to putting them in, since we were prioritizing the native engine.
For large text rendering issues, the reason that might not be fixing quickly is that we actually hit a technical limit of HTML5's texture sizes. Basically, we have trouble rendering some larger text because we can't make textures that big (or at least as big on mobile). We did do some work on the text rendering to fix some artifacts that showed up on rendering cursive and serifed fonts though, so we're not just leaving it alone. Since text display is the easiest to work around (pre-render the text), that's probably the last one we'll fix of the 3 issue you mention, but it's definitely something that will get another look.
For the collision thing, we literally ripped out Box2D and replaced it with a different version to try to fix the issue, but to no avail. I think we finally have a lead on the issue though, as we found a different collision bug that sort of indicates what's going on with the resizing bug! (if you're curious, for custom collisions, in HTML5, if you put the Collision behavior on one of the actors, then collisions don't work. But if you put it on the other actor you want to collide with, it does). That particular bug gives as a different thread to pull on that might help us figure out what's going on.
In terms of priorities, I'm probably gonna take another look into the collision thing before the other two bugs (mostly because will likely affect more people and there's no way to work around it).
In other updates, we THINK we have a solution to the Chartboost issues, which means we should be releasing some iOS engine updates soon crosses fingers. In case you were curious, we were running into a bug that would cause the app to freeze in a deadlock if you dismissed a Chartboost video ad early.
So if testing pans out, the next release should have the following:
Thanks for the extra info on those issues @adent42 ...
One thought on those tricky issues for HTML5 is to perhaps just come up with the best solution possible to mitigate the problem, even if it's not a proper solution.
Obviously these issues are going to affect everyone differently, seeing everyone's project is different, but from my perspective, a few ideas...
POSITIONAL / PITCHED SOUND
From what you've said, these things can now be put in, due to more features being available for HTML5 audio. So I guess these things can be done properly. Great. Is this just a matter of time, for someone to implement it? Nothing else blocking progress on that?
COLLISIONS
For me, this issue isn't about custom collision shapes. It's just about normal square and sphere collision shapes, and the fact that - if an actor changes size, the collision shape doesn't update to match that size.
Would it be possible to detect any change in the actor's width or height, and if they change, update the size of the collider (or destroy and recreate the collider altogether on any frame that the actor has changed size)?
Another hacky solution to your custom colliders problem (again, I've never used custom colliders, so I wouldn't know about it, and I don't personally care about it), could you, for HTML5 output only, just force those to be a sphere collider, or box collider instead, so that at least it kinda works for now?
TEXT RENDERING
Where larger fonts look corrupted on HTML5, I wonder whether you could hack in a solution for now that just cap how large the textures can be, and just "blow them up larger" where needed.
Just some ideas.
@Hymloe:
Sounds, yep, it's just a matter of time and priority.
Text rendering, the solution I think we need is to figure out if we need to use multiple textures for larger text and do that. I need to check the native engine and see what changes we made and match those.
For collision shapes, we are updating the collision shapes for resize just as in the native engine, but the system isn't registering the change. The code is almost exactly the same as in the native engine. The first time we tried to debug this issue, I think it was actually resizing the collision box, but it wouldn't stop the existing collision. So if you were colliding and resized, it would keep colliding on the old shape. But if you resized and then collided, it would see the new shape / size. Since the custom collision shapes aren't registering correctly either, I think it's something to do with the system that communicates collisions to Box2D in general, hence why the new bug might give me a different angle of attack.
Cool, thanks for the news and thoughts on each point.
Good luck with it!
Is it always present on our games right now? I thought we had this feature.
Check out my games on the App Store!
Wordgraphy / Polycolor / 20 Seconds / Minimal Maze
@unbeatenpixel the app doesn't specifically tell the OS it wants hiding so I think it takes longer. I only notices because I was trying to debug the touch issue and was wondering why the home bar stayed their so long.
@Braydon_SFX @adent42 Still looking for the ticket?
I can submit another one if you guys would like since you ignored my comment.
Had found your ticket and someone from our team replied. You said it was resolved, but perhaps this is for a different issue? Feel free to PM me personally and I'll get you straightened out.
My GameSalad Academy Courses! ◦ Check out my quality templates! ◦ Add me on Skype: braydon_sfx
Don't recall a response from GameSalad at all.. Would be happy to PM you
@adent42 - the click issues are also a problem on newer android devices.
Is the fix also working on android?
@Zwire I haven't looked into it yet. I'm shooting to get the new iOS build out this weekend and then start looking at android next week. If you haven't yet, could you send to @ForumNinja the OS version and device model? Actually, if anyone else sees this problem, do the same!
Took me long enough.
If you look on publishing, you'll now see a "Experimental Build" button next to generate.
This will, from now until we get tired of supporting it, generate using whatever new features we have available.
In this case, for iOS it will build with the new updates for iPhone X, and updated Chartboost and Tapdaq SDKs (as outlined above). If, in a couple of days, I don't hear about any new bugs, then I'll push it up as the default build and remove the "Experimental Build" button until next time.
Cheers!
Nice, will test.
Does it include the edge of screen fix as well?
@adent42 Publishing seems to be stuck
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Yes, stuck as can be.
Hello ! I have a random quiz game in my current learning application , but there's a problem that I've been trying to solve for about 2 months but still I can't find any fix. The problem is that the removed row in the quiz didn't comeback or restored when I tried to restart the quiz (not the reset game function) . When i reset the quiz with the functions of resetting the question answered and score , the questions and answer will disappear and can't take the quiz again . Please I badly need help. need to solve this problem within 2 days. I wait for a reply here or better email me here : renzbayas16@gmail.com. Please help me
@adent42 @jr2520
If you're removing the questions from the table, when you want to restart the quiz you'll need to "refill" the table. Normally people do this by making a second table with the questions in, and copying that to the table you're using at the start of the game using the Copy Table function.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Okay... looks like the icon server was stuck. One day, I'm gonna have to reverse engineer that assets bundle format so we don't have one extra random Mac server sitting around packaging icons (and occasionally failing).
It may take a bit to catch up as we work through the queue of publishes.
@adent42 Can't publish at all now, or view my publishing portal at all.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Yah, try again. I rebooted the server. Something is hitting our server hard a lot recently, but since it hits it in such a way that logs stop working, I'm still trying to figure out how to check what's happening.
Thanks!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support