Bug Reports
I've submitted many bug reports, some from more than a few months ago, one after another and I've gotten no response at all from Gamesalad. What the hell is going on? Are the users really not important at all to them? Anyone else getting no support? I don't understand why they allow us to submit bug reports if they're just gonna throw it in the trash or something. This is so exhausting, having an app that is ready to be submitted but due to a bug report, it's performing poorly, please do something GAMESALAD!!!
Comments
"but due to a bug report, it's performing poorly" - Likelihood is that its not a bug making it perform badly! It will either be out of GameSalad's limitations or bad programming!
Try mentioning the problems you are having on here and see if anyone can help
This is in highlighted text directly over where you put the bug report description.
Can someone please please help me fix these problems? I would really much appreciated because I've been wanting to submit this app for months and these are the only problems that are holding me back. Please list any suggestions guys, thanks
@Dazza006
@beefy_clyro
@LiquidGameworks
270mb will probably crash a lot of Android devices.
There is a known sound delay, its not just a GS thing. There was a choice, support the majority of devices and have a slight delay or dont have a delay but sounds would not be supported on quite a few devices (inc the kindle iirc). Search the forums for Android delay and you will see all the discussions on it. Search google with gamesalad android sound delay.
I dont think its just a fixable thing! It just sounds like the size and accuracy of what you need is out of GS's scope, its not a bug!
There are bugs I've reported up to 2 years ago that have brought projects to a swift halt, and not only was there zero feedback from GS, but the bugs are still there in the software, as I've suggested before - in my own opinion - the best route when encountering a bug is not to wait around for a software fix but to post it on the forums, there are numerous smart, talented and very helpful forums members who are only too willing to work out a solution for you pretty quickly. I'd always recommend that route first if the issue is stopping you complete your project.
A while ago SSS mentioned producing a list of bugs that GS were aware of, that would be really useful as it would save people reporting stuff that has already been reported and you already know about - and it would give users a sense that you have these bugs on your 'to be addressed' list. Here are a few bugs that have been in GameSalad for years (literally) - and reported more than once:
Are you aware that the brightness and opacity sliders in the colour selection wheel often crash creator if you try and adjust values using them ?
That the interpolation algorithm has the last part of it's destination value clipped so on things like fading in and out of images and ramping up/down of audio all end up with annoying glitches at the end ?
Importing a sequence of animation frames into creator screws up their order and they have to be manually reordered before being placed in the animate behaviour.
Deleting assets like audio and images often returns in strange results - images are not deleted, the wrong images are deleted, the image panel fails to update so you are not entirely sure whether your action was successful.
The frame rates in the animate behaviour are all 'screwed', they not only don't match the frame rates displayed on the behaviour's slider, but they bear little relation to each other (21fps runs at the same speed as 27fps / 28fps and 29fps both run at 20.1fps / 20fps runs at 16.5 fps . . . etc etc) ?
. . . and so on, there are quite a few bugs like this that have been present for a couple of years or so, like I say they've been reported, and more than once, and exhaustively, and through the correct channels. I understand that you can't address every bug or glitch people might hit, but it would be at least good to know you where aware of them and that we weren't just shooting these reports into a black hole, as I said above I think the real issue is one of communication.
SSS's idea of a known bug list would go someway to giving people the sense that they are not being ignored, even knowing a bug was unlikely to be addressed in the near future would be much better than being left entirely in the dark. False hope can be a cruel mistress
One of my first projects - that relies on reasonably accurate frame rates (or even internally consistent, if not accurate, frame rates) - still lives in hope even though it has now got a fairly thick coat of dust on it.
Yep, that's pretty much what I suspect too, if the native engine is on its way there would be little point GS investing too much time and effort in the current engine (although to be honest I have little idea about what's involved / whether some parts of the current code can be transferred to the new engine - etc). But again with the new engine there is little in the way of solid communication to plan around, whether bugs will be addressed (if they even need to be) is an unknown, when the engine might arrive is, at best, vague (probably for good reasons), so we are still pretty much in the dark about when or if these kinds of issues might be resolved.
But, yes, a known bugs list, would shine a little light onto what is happening in the engine room.
[mixed metaphors for sale, PM me]
@socks I would guess they will try to release the engine without bugs, i'm sure its never intentional to have them there
Thing is, I dont think you should plan around certain things per se. I know what the software does and can do, I only take on projects that I know I can see through, not relying on an update to add/fix something! Its nice to know what is coming but its software, its development, things can always change .. I just work to what I know for the current!
I've not used the Windows creator so unfortunately cant comment on any experience!
GS is literally the only software I open on a regular basis that crashes. Even After Effects, which is notoriously fickle, has not crashed once in the last two years nor has 3DSMAX w/ VRay, a combination even more notoriously fickle, in months. Just GS.
I can set my watch by its crash cycle and I'm betting that, considering the typical software I have to run on a daily basis, I have a significantly more tweaked-out machine than most folks...I can't imagine there's many GS users rocking Dual quad-core, SLI Video card setup (~2GB video RAM), 24GB system RAM and external rackmount sound devices. At least, not on the Windows side of things. I'm pretty sure that if I can run a 3D liquid simulation in realtime I should be able to run GS.
I remember the days of having to save every 10 mins for the fact that GS would crash! There was a known memory leak which got patched thank god! Haven't heard that its a known thing for Windows machines though, haven't seen many reports of it constantly crashing!
I have no idea i'm afraid
GameSalad is a piece of software put together by some brilliant programmers - the aim of the software is to make app generation available to non-programmers, central amongst these I would say are designers, artists, illustrators and assorted 'creative' types.
There is an enormous aesthetic element to our app culture, gone are the days when simply being able to program is sufficient to generate an app, you need great art too (or at least decent art / design).
Whereas a good designer would be appalled at bad kerning, fades that glitch and actors that lack anti-aliasing on their edges, a programmer simply might not notice, I think GameSalad lack this aesthetic awareness.
It's not that bugs would ever be intentionally included, but that without this aesthetic awareness things like poor kerning and the annoying interpolate bug (etc) might well migrate from the old engine to the new as it's simply not a concern to someone who can crunch through a novel's worth of C+ in an afternoon but has never picked up a Pantone swatch.
Even GameSalad's own game ("Too Fat To Fly") had a few of these small oversights that a good designer wouldn't have let through. No one (well, no one sane) starts a project they know the software might struggle with - relying on a possible update to add/fix something, I think that's a poor caricature of the issue here.
The very nature of bugs is that they tend to be unpredictable. Good !
Agreed, the engine (at least on the OS X side) is much more stable than it used to be.
I've released my titles and probably quite like GameSalad, bugs can be overlooked. That is, you don't see it, things are used in different ways/orders than you test, and such, a bug is present. Now thats not the case for everything but its that kind of thing I guess.
Ive experienced most of what you complain about.
However, One thing that should be pointed out is that interpolation is based on float mathematics.
when multiplying dividing fractions (decimals) it is unlikely to arrive at a whole number.
and numbers that get "rounded" when doing math against decimals makes it even more unlikely.
In most programming, this value I think is called "epsilon".
its something like the maximum deviation.
However, I don't think GS has a function for epsilon.
You can just assume a value and it should work all the same.
say 4 spaces beyond the decimal.
when game.Timer >= 9.999 then game.Timer = 10.
or be safer
when game.Timer >= 9.9 then game.Timer = 10.
Or make a variable, and give it a value like .005, name it epsilon and you will be very close to most other programming languages.
But yea, google Float mathematics or epsilon and someone who is smarter than me will explain it better.
I'm sick and tired of all this waiting for the new-engine. This is so disappointing... :_(
i.e. You can have a picture which is 1mb, this contributes to the overall app size (your 16mb) but the RAM of the 1mb picture maybe bigger because of the container size it must use. Largely, this comes down to the resolution of the picture.
Again, search the forums for a proper explanation. I believe what you think are bugs are more than likely not!
If you interpolate from 0 to 1 you should expect (I'm using only 2 decimal places here):
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
. . [snip] . .
0.85
0.86
0.87
0.88
0.89
0.90
0.91
0.92
0.93
0.94
0.95
0.96
0.97
0.98
0.99
1.00 . . .
But what actually happens is this . . . .
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
. . [snip] . .
0.85
0.86
0.87
0.88
0.89
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00 . . .
Does that sound like the float mathematics issue ? It works both ways (i.e: interpolate from 1 to 0 and the last 0.1 is 'clipped') - there are ways around this - for a fade from (or to) black and fading a piece of audio in and out you are better off interpolating a much high numerical range (for example 0 to 255 is ideal for a visual fade) and passing that interpolating value to an attribute - then constraining your actor's opacity to the attribute divided by 255 - (but you might well know all that already).
Which all comes back to the idea that GS are much more programmers and less so designers (of course), I suspect a designer would have seen this issue a mile off the first time he or she noticed the little glitches and jumps in what should be smooth fades and audio ramps and built in a system (perhaps interpolation values could be internally multiplied and then divided to loose the glitch ?) that was invisibly/internally handled by GS to address the issue - but then again a designer wouldn't have been able to put together something like GS to begin with.
Anyhow, the point being that in a world (the app world) where the customer is increasingly design-sophisticated (did I just make that term up ! Ug !) I think it would be enormously useful to have a dedicated designer working with a software team, someone who would scream (in a slightly camp way) on seeing some design faux-pas that a programmer might not only have not noticed but be indifferent to if he did.
I think I've gone on enough !
It is ! It's the new Lourdes, I expect a queue of wheelchairs outside GameSalad HQ on the day of launch.