Release Candidate 0.11.0.3 is available!
BlackCloakGS
Member, PRO Posts: 2,250
Release Candidate 0.11.0.3
Fixes:
- Added support for Android 4.3 and 4.4
- Fixed Rules and Loops not expanding correctly when created minimized
- Fixed "Save As" not working on computers with FileVault enabled. No longer deletes images and sounds.
- Fixed white box appearing at the start of animations
- Fixed "Change Image" drop down not updating after new images were imported into project
- Fixed Blend mode not being set correctly for particles
Known Issues:
- Possible memory leak with scene unloading
- Creator will not open if your GateKeeper settings are set to "Mac App Store" or "Mac App Store and identified developers"
- See forum post for additional information about changes to Animation behavior and supported image formats
Notes:
Changes to Animation Behavior
Due to the nature of our behavior system, we cannot guarantee the order of execution of behaviors. We will occasionally make changes to how we execute behavior to improve performance or fix bugs.
First, some users had problems where animation didn’t play at the correct frame rate. We’ve fixed that issue, but in fixing that issue we exposed another bug. In older versions of the engine, we start animation as soon as the behavior is active. Unfortunately if the images haven’t been loaded yet, you’d see mismatches in what was expected to display and what actually displayed.
With GameSalad 0.11.0, we’ve made a change to the Animate behavior where animation won’t start immediately upon trigger of the behavior. It will start after all the images are loaded. If you haven’t marked the animation frames for preloading, then you may see a slight delay between the activation of the Animate behavior and the animation starting. This delay happens as we wait until all of the images are loaded into memory before playing the animation.
If your animations are time sensitive, we suggest you mark the animation images for preloading.
Supported Image Formats
Based reasonable assumptions from most people's experience it makes sense to do all you can to make your images as small as possible on disk. Small images load faster on the web, right?
Things work a bit differently on mobile:
1) Smaller images load faster, right?
On the web, the biggest bottleneck is network latency / transfer speed. The time to download an image from a server is so much larger than any other part of the image loading process that you want to get your images as small as possible. This assumption doesn't work on mobile. On modern mobile devices, images are loaded from flash memory rather quickly. So the time to decompress the image is a much larger part of the equation. So on mobile smaller file size doesn't always equal faster loading. It's actually faster for users to load an image that is in the graphic's system native frame buffer format at full size than it is to load a compressed images at a fraction of the file size!
2) Smaller images take less memory. In the GameSalad engine, we take every image and expand all the bits into memory. So no how matter how small your 1024x1024 image file with alpha, when you load it into memory it will always take up 4MB of RAM. Squeezing a few KB off of your image file won't help it take up less memory. If you are really concerned about memory, then design your images to have smaller dimensions but in a style that will stretch well.
3) Apps are shipped compressed. Both Android APKs and Apple IPAs are zipped formats, so you will have further savings in download size in the final product from this. Everything in your game will benefit from this compression including images and music! They won’t be as compressed as they would be in the specialized formats for these assets, but they will be smaller than you see them on disk as you work with your game.
Image formats are a tricky issue. Even within a single format (e.g. png or tga) there are many variations. The 0.11.0 GameSalad engine has changed how we load images to increase performance. In order to get this faster loading and render performance we need to get stricter on the file formats we support.
To this end we will not be supporting png images that are compressed using libimagequant / pngquant or any other png images that modify pngs from what you would normally save using the standard save formats from your image authoring software (i.e. Photoshop, Gimp, etc). This includes running images through tools like tinypng.com or Pngyu.
After the 0.11 update, we will be moving away from png as the preferred storage format and going to one that will provide better performance for the game engine. This format will employ some clever magic to make image files smaller but still much closer to what the devices uses in memory. This new format will save both disk and memory space and will decrease loading time tremendously. They'll even have the added benefit of making it much harder for people to break open your game and steal your images!
For your existing project you should either drop the original images you had before running the compression tools or run a script to convert them all back to more standard index or 32 bit PNG images.
We're sorry if this short term change hurts your projects in the short term by making the bigger,
but this change is setting things up bigger, better (and faster) things!
Report Any Bugs
If you find bugs in the Release Candidate, let us know! We'll be watching the forums and support tickets for info on this. Once we're all happy with the state of the build then we'll make it stable.
Take a moment to review the "known issues" section of the release notes before reporting any bugs. No need to duplicate reports on what we already know, right?
Thanks for your help!
Go Get It!
See the release notes here:
http://gamesalad.com/download/releaseNotes/creator/rc
Download the release candidate here:
http://gamesalad.com/download/releases
Scroll down until you see "Release Candidates"
Comments
@BlackCloakGS Great stuff - looking forward to the future.
Are ALL fixes listed?
I submitted a bug report for revmob never displaying on scene change when the scene is previous in the order. The ticket has been closed as resolved. Has it been resolved?
Also, like others, black screens appear for many seconds on Android devices following the close of Revmob ads. Even on fast devices such as a newish HTC phone. Has this been fixed?
I thought you fix revmob display when a scene change. I suspect that this is a very important issue for many GS users.
Yes, of course I mean dollars :-)
Please, hear my request seriously.
Best Regards
PRO
Looking great @BlackCloakGS.
Great to see the attention to detail in fixing all these issues, great and small. And great to hear all the details and extra advice and explanation associated with each entry. Excellent and much appreciated!
And it's really great to see the updates and fixing coming in steadily. Hopefully we'll end up with a really great 0.11 build for the final release of a major version. Nice.
Keen to see that Scene Change memory leak fixed (I guess that goes without saying, really!).
@BlackCloakGS I still have the same image display problem as stated in the *NB 250 thread. I submitted a new bug report ticket (#4052) as you requested and PM'ed you. I haven't heard from either you or GS Support so I don't know if you even acknowledge this as an bug. Can you update me on what is happening, thanks.
Edit: Changed "previous RC" to "NB 250"
Universal Binary Template - Universal Binary Template Instructions Rev 4 (Short) - Custom Score Display Template
@colander CS and I are looking at that issue right now
@darrelf do you have a ticket number?
@gajaklukasz please submit a support ticket
I've been using 8bit PNGs made with Photoshop to save on disk space where I can. Should I stop doing that as well, or is it just those compression madoodles that have this effect?
@vafurlogi 8 bit non optimized and NON pre-multiplied alpha png should work. We will convert in memory (so we do not touch the original) to 32bit on load. So you will only save space on disk not memory
Hi
Has the issue regarding Android not designed for Tablets been fixed? Thanks..and God Bless...
Sincerely,
Sunday
Thank you,testing!
@BlackCloak Thank you for the explanation above about how the GS engine handles images.
As a Web Developer for the past 16 years I have always been very conscious of file sizes and kept them as small as possible. My mainstay for creating graphics is Adobe Fireworks because it can be used for both vector and bitmap graphics. It also has some basic photo manipulation tools and can be used to create animated GIFs. PNG is the native file format for the master or creation file and it can export 8, 24 and 32 bit PNGs as well as TIFF, GIF and JPGs.
Most of my app graphics have been 8 bit PNGs, some with transparency. 32 bit with gradients for backgrounds.
Q. Do Fireworks PNGs meet the criteria given above?
Q. Should I start exporting all my graphics as 32 bit PNGs henceforth.
Thanks.
@BlackCloakGS I'm still having the pure-alpha issue with images. When I alter the alpha (eg. when touch is pressed) the image appears to have a layer of grey.
@BlackCloakGS I too am experiencing the now notorius and seemingly ignored issue with interpolating alpha. This is a big thing for a lot of us and i've yet to see a solid response. It literally makes the newest builds unusable. You're essentially removing a feature at this point if it goes unresolved.
I am using 32 bit png's and have been for the longest time. So that is not the issue. It's really starting to worry me. So please...
WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THIS BUG?
Awesome work guys! After doing some research though it appears that Fireworks premultiplies alpha and there does not seem to be any way around that. If anyone has any suggestions I have started a thread for this as I think this will effect anybody using Fireworks.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/66615/rc3-and-premultiplied-alpha-when-using-fireworks
My Latest GS Game - Tiny Spirit
My First GS Game - Dashing Ralph
@stueynet The way i understand it is png's as a file type are literally always "non-premultiplied" for transparency. So by having PNG's it should be correct with "transparency". I'd like to see some insight from the devs though, as there is a TON of confusion going on.
Info of standardization of png's http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Rationale.html
So I'm guessing using ImageOptim isn't recommended ether. It's not listed but its similar to those other programs. How do I find out what bit my pngs are? I mostly use Pixelmator and Inkscape. I've looked under some of the info sections but I can't find what bit they are, and I'm seeing a few different answers online.
Does anybody know what script or program we can use to revert the images back to their original save state for our current projects.
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I checked Inkscape and they are 32 bit.
Universal Binary Template - Universal Binary Template Instructions Rev 4 (Short) - Custom Score Display Template
Wondering why Gamesalad seems to be the only engine that seems to have issues with PNG files. Seems once again they start to brake things that work before. And there is really absolute no performance issue why not to use PNG files... It's a standard on all other platforms and yes it even works fine before. Also what's about the alpha issue? Would be at least great if you could confirm you get it and working on it.
+1 this for me!
We have 5 games with this issue that we waited until RC1 to get ad support, then RC2 to get the ad loading times/blackscreen issue fixed, now RC3, still not there. Anything I can do to help, screen shots, video, examples... let me know. I will republish a couple simple games with RC3 so you can download and see the result.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/63454/fast-frame-swap/p1
Once you've changed (lowered) the bit depth of an image that colour information is gone, it can't be recovered, if you reduce an image file from 16,777,216 colours to 256 colours (24 bit to 8 bit) then converting the image back to 24 bit will not increase the number of colours used, you will just have 256 colours mapped to a 24 bit colour space.
@darrelf
yes the same for me, revmob and chartboos dosen't works, sporadically the interstitial appears, this is a real big unresolved issue.. @BlackCloakGS please could you reply about this question:
RevMob and ChartBoost works fine or not?
thanks
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Revmob & Chartboost still not work stable in new RC.You hard to see the ad display. The other main problem is Playhaven interstitial ads not display in RC & Nightly ...If you want use Playhaven interstitial, your only choice is back to 0.10.4.1 ...
@AlvinF
Yes the Playhaven interstitial ads works only in the 0.10.4.1
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Same here. Completely uncompressed .png files get very dark when their alpha is set or interpolated to a value lower than 1. If you don't want your game to look terrible you can't release a game with GameSalad right now.
It's incredibly annoying that there has been no comment on this for weeks, it's (visually) project-wrecking.
@BlackCloakGS
The fact that you'll not support converted pngs is a huge deal for me. But It can be resolved if you
1. Add support of chartboost\revmob for 1041
2. Make ability to create apk with extra files to allow application on Google play bigger than 50 mb.
Do you plan to support any of that?
Shadows Peak is an atmospheric psychological horror that explores the dark side of a player.
@BlackCloakGS
It seems some real major issues are still present which I so hope are ironed out before release. Such awesome work has been done to get to this stage, it'd be a shame for a "stable" build to have problems with ads, black screens, interpolating alpha, memory leak etc.
My ticket numbers are:
Memory leak (ticket #4121 - still open). I'm sure it's a real problem as all I'm doing is changing between 2 identical scenes and RAM usage keeps increasing until the app crashes.
Revmob ad not displaying on change scene behaviour if target scene is a previous scene (ticket #4083).
Other Revmob testing feedback (ticket #'s 4103 & 4138). Also, further testing on Sunday on a newish ITC phone - every time a Revmob ad was closed, a black screen appeared for up to 10 seconds. I'm sure most players would get very bored with this or assume the app has crashed and close it.
Let me know if I can help by supplying example projects or try any other coding approaches - unlike iAd's, Revmob ad display seems VERY sensitive to layer order, code order, device.
Thanks
@darrelf
I do understand you frustration, but the RC version mentions "CAUTION:EXPERIMENTAL BUILD NOT FOR PRODUCTION". No one tells you this is a stable version with all the features working correctly. Lets wait for the stable 0.11
@BlackCloakGS
you said this new image system will make it harder to steal images, but will it also make them harder to replace?