State of GameSalad on 7-31-2013
CodeWizard
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 1,143
Hello! It's that time again... time for another weekly state of GameSalad post. Sorry for the delay on this post.
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
No stable release planned scheduled yet. QA is still digging through our first release candidate for 0.11.0. QA is still making progress on this release in between the various other testing tasks. More news when it's available!
Once our Amazon in-app-purchase and GameCircle changes are ready for release, we'll be pushing them out in a special build for you. This will be released before 0.11.0.
We will be updating publishing binaries to 0.10.3a soon to fix an issue with iOS coming down the pipe.
What’s New This Week?
1. We filled our system admin position. We're not done hiring yet, though! If you're a skilled developer, check out our job postings here: http://gamesalad.com/jobs
2. We've finished up a new behavior that will allow you to contact a web server, request a JSON document and put it into a table for your game to use. This behavior will enable all kinds of neat server-side features. This will be in the nightly builds shortly.
3. We're still wrangling the build process for our Android code. It's getting closer!
4. We're neck deep integrating Amazon's in-app-purchase and GameCircle systems. When this is done, you'll be able to create IAP / GameCircle apps on Kindle Fire for FREE. More news soon!
5. We're continuing to optimize the HTML5 engine for Tizen support. It's a slog, but things are improving.
6. We've done several more passes of Lua profiling and optimization. Lots of incremental improvements here should be showing up in the nightly build soon.
7. We've been discussing RevMob integration internally. Looks like we may well be biting this off sooner rather than later. More info when the work begins.
8. We're also spending cycles profiling and optimizing History Fighter loading performance.
9. Oh, one last thing, we're still working on iOS 7 compatibility. Making sure to stay ahead of the curve on that!
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
No stable release planned scheduled yet. QA is still digging through our first release candidate for 0.11.0. QA is still making progress on this release in between the various other testing tasks. More news when it's available!
Once our Amazon in-app-purchase and GameCircle changes are ready for release, we'll be pushing them out in a special build for you. This will be released before 0.11.0.
We will be updating publishing binaries to 0.10.3a soon to fix an issue with iOS coming down the pipe.
What’s New This Week?
1. We filled our system admin position. We're not done hiring yet, though! If you're a skilled developer, check out our job postings here: http://gamesalad.com/jobs
2. We've finished up a new behavior that will allow you to contact a web server, request a JSON document and put it into a table for your game to use. This behavior will enable all kinds of neat server-side features. This will be in the nightly builds shortly.
3. We're still wrangling the build process for our Android code. It's getting closer!
4. We're neck deep integrating Amazon's in-app-purchase and GameCircle systems. When this is done, you'll be able to create IAP / GameCircle apps on Kindle Fire for FREE. More news soon!
5. We're continuing to optimize the HTML5 engine for Tizen support. It's a slog, but things are improving.
6. We've done several more passes of Lua profiling and optimization. Lots of incremental improvements here should be showing up in the nightly build soon.
7. We've been discussing RevMob integration internally. Looks like we may well be biting this off sooner rather than later. More info when the work begins.
8. We're also spending cycles profiling and optimizing History Fighter loading performance.
9. Oh, one last thing, we're still working on iOS 7 compatibility. Making sure to stay ahead of the curve on that!
Comments
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Great Stuff though \m/
Does this mean we can do pop-up notifications in the future?
I think for GS they might be hosting the push server if it is required? I'm sure we will get much more information as it comes close.
can't wait for amazon iAP/GameCircle!
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Also, yay on the Revmob discussion
1) Have you guys finished up the creator workflow improvements yet?
and 2) Are you looking to include custom fonts in the next stable build? I think this should be a high priority since everyone would benefit from it and it would make things SO much easier.
Sadly, we have a looooong list of workflow improvements we want to do in Creator. It's slow going though. Not much progress on that front as we've been focused on optimizations and other features.
The custom font system we whipped up for History Fighter isn't for public consumption. Not because we're being mean... but because it's just kind of a hacked up mess. There's no nice way for you to put fonts in. We did it by hand.
The "real" custom font system is waiting on some other low level engine changes to be implemented (i.e. sprite sheets and batching). We're stalled a bit on that as we get the build process cleaned up for the engine and Creator. Once that's out of the way (knock on wood, it's soon) then we'll hop right on the sprite sheet and batching support. Once that's done then we can support creating custom font sprite sheets from a TTF (or using your own bitmaps) and get it in.
We'll begin integrating this system in the next 60 days or so (hopefully sooner).
So, push notifications and whatnot are on the way!
Do you think adding a flag to keep the screen on is something that could be added pretty simple? I'm not familiar with the game engine, but adding it in Obj C and Java is simple enough.
It would just be nice to have a simple behavior to flag the screen to stay on on whatever scene you place it. The problem I am having is with a game I'm working on with the Accelerometer. If you aren't tapping the screen every so often it just shuts off which can get very annoying. If you have a game where you touch the screen often that is fine, but if you have an accelerometer based game it just becomes an annoyance.
With regards to:
"2. We've finished up a new behavior that will allow you to contact a web server, request a JSON document and put it into a table for your game to use. This behavior will enable all kinds of neat server-side features. This will be in the nightly builds shortly."
This is great!
So I gotta ask... Thoughts on push to server abilities?
Yeah, this should be pretty easy. Adding a feature request for this and we'll see if we can get it into the nightly builds ASAP.
Awesome thank you very much. Would be a very useful tool indeed.
Regarding #2: Can the JSON document contain images that can be displayed in the game when loaded? Or is this limited to text?
Also, and I know this is a loaded question... Can you disclose who the third party multiplayer support is from, so that we can get started reading documentation for implementation?
Image loading from a website would be a nice addition. That's not handled in this feature though. This is focused on downloading JSON data and populating a table with that data.
So, it's good for loading text / game variables / server-generated content from a web server.
Thanks for all the info.