State of GameSalad on 5-15-2015

ForumNinja

Hello again all you GameSalad fans! Once again I’ve gathered some info on what we’ve been working / focused on to share with you guys, enjoy!

Short Version:

I’ve been given a screenshot of the new marketplace to share with you guys (you can see it below)! We are still working towards getting out new stable builds for both the Mac and Windows versions of GameSalad. The number of known issues just keeps getting smaller and smaller! Our current release candidates that are out are 0.13.13 for Mac and 0.13.4 for Windows. More work is still being done on Graphene (can’t share any more news yet).

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Standard Version:

1. Graphene SDK (previously known as “Cross platform Creator”). There’s still more work coming along on Graphene’s website as well as the tool itself. For other previously shared info or to sign up for beta access, refer to this thread: http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/75011/introducing-graphene-sdk/

2. Release Candidate 0.13.4 for Windows version of GameSalad Creator. We are still working on fixing up the known issues before pushing out a stable build. For the full list of features, known issues, and to report any issues you have using the 0.13.4 RC build head to this thread: http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/86126/windows-creator-rc-0-13-4-is-available. To download the release, head here: http://gamesalad.com/download/releases Note: It is highly recommended that you uninstall any old versions of the Windows Creator Nightly before installing the new one.

3. Release candidate 0.13.13 for Mac version of GameSalad Creator! We recently pushed out another RC build for our Mac users that has even more fixes, so go download it here: http://gamesalad.com/download/releases! The list of known issues in this build is getting smaller every day. For more info on this release and to report bugs that you’ve found, refer to this thread: http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/86262/release-candidate-0-13-13-mac-arc-with-performance-improvements.

4. Release 0.14.0 for the Windows version of GameSalad Creator. We plan on putting a new nightly build out for this release after we finish getting a stable 0.13.x Windows build out. This release is planned to be the one that gets Windows version of Creator fully synched up with the Mac version feature wise! This includes all the features we have planned for our 0.14.0 release for Mac as well (see some below)!

5. Release 0.14.0 for the Mac version of Creator. We recently put out a new nightly build for this release. One feature that’s in this release that wasn’t talked about before is the new Pathfinding system and behaviors (for Pro members only). A few features this release will have are AdMob integration, the new rendering engine, and full PlaysTogether support. Check out this thread for more info on release 0.14.1: http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/86130/nightly-build-0-14-1/p1.

6. New marketplace! Check out this screenshot of the new marketplace! It’s getting closer every day.

That’s all I have for you guys. More info will be coming your way next week.

neoman

Thanks for the update! The new market place looks pretty and RC 0.13.13 for Mac is working great. Thanks for the hard work! Cheers

Braydon_SFX

Wow! Love the look of the new marketplace! Glad to see you've also got some good testers!

Armelline

Looking forward to submitting to the new marketplace!

MentalDonkeyGames

The marketplace looks nice!

robertkdale

Nice!

PhilipCC

@ForumNinja Will the Marketplace have a shopping cart where one can save a "wish list"? Like a kid in a toy store, I like to make my list as I trawl through, then go back and cull it to fit my pocket book.

Socks

The new Marketplace looks great !!!!

I really really hope you're are going to apply some kind of admissions standard to the new Marketplace, the old Marketplace suffered not only from a subpar interface but also a very low admissions standard (some assets where so poor they verged on the comical !) - it really made the whole thing look bad to see page after page of poor quality assets scroll by, the good stuff really suffered by being thrown into (and lost in) a sea of poor quality assets.

I've been selling stock material (footage, motion graphics) for years now (7-8 +) and each and every submission is scrutinised for all manner of aesthetic and technical requirements, you need to prove that your product is worthy of the site it's being sold on - allowing free entrance (upload whatever you want) just ends up with a store full of hundreds of thousands of low quality assets that - eventually - no one can be bothered to fight their way through, in my opinion it's better to have a store with 2,000 high quality products than a store with 130,000 assets of random quality. Every major stock site has moved in this direction - submissions being vetted by actual humans, and if the submissions fail to meet the set standards they are rejected (usually with pointers on how to improve them to acceptable standards).

I really hope you don't go back to the 'upload whatever you want' model !!

Also . . . a 'most downloaded' list view is very useful in a few respects, not least for developers, if you can view a section and see which files are the most searched for or downloaded you get an instant overview of the market, of what people want . . . so on finding out that 'tank battle' outranks 'maze games' by 40:1 you can quickly see that your efforts at a maze game might be better directed at a tank battle template or tank assets - when this simple addition to the Pond5 listings (view by downloads/sales) happened, overnight the submissions became more focused, no more wasted nights building 3D robots or filming clouds when it was suddenly clear that customers were buying footage of people, cars and starfields.

Braydon_SFX

@Socks
+1

Hypnorabbit

Looking forward to the new marketplace! @Socks is on the ball with feedback and suggestions. Please take note of them!

JSproject

+1 @Socks comments

PhilipCC

@Socks +1 more, I agree wholeheartedly.

3dgreg

I've been reading through the forums on asset submissions. Most of the post seem to be fairly old and not very good news for new submitters, (i.E, send a sample to GS and wait long periods of time). Has any of that changed since those post? (Some date back to 2012 and 2014). I totally agree with the standards rule as Socks mentioned above. I believe I can produce a quality product but not sure if it's worth the time here. (Sorry, just being honest). I do see the value and need for the market place however, just wondering if the process has changed or been redefined. No offense meant, I wouldn't be here if I didn't really like this site.

jonmulcahy

@3dgreg said:
I've been reading through the forums on asset submissions. Most of the post seem to be fairly old and not very good news for new submitters, (i.E, send a sample to GS and wait long periods of time). Has any of that changed since those post? (Some date back to 2012 and 2014). I totally agree with the standards rule as Socks mentioned above. I believe I can produce a quality product but not sure if it's worth the time here. (Sorry, just being honest). I do see the value and need for the market place however, just wondering if the process has changed or been redefined. No offense meant, I wouldn't be here if I didn't really like this site.

Outside of a few beta testers and the folks at GS, no one has any idea how the new system will work. Hopefully as it gets closer to release they provide those answers so content makers can start preparing stuff!

ForumNinja

@Socks We will definitely have higher standards as far as marketplace submissions go this time around

Socks

@ForumNinja said:
Socks We will definitely have higher standards as far as marketplace submissions go this time around

That's really great to hear Obviously judging aesthetic quality is going to be a little more subjective than technical quality, but I hope you keep the quality of both high - so although you can insist on images being 24/32bit, 72ppi, divisible by 4 and perhaps even conforming to the powers of 2 rule to some extent (so no 514 x 514 pixel images!) and so on . . . . I'm not sure how you'd handle images like this Marketplace classic . .

. . . it would probably meet all technical requirements, but it's questionable as to whether it would really earn its place in a quality asset store or is much use to developers.

On a lot of the big sites, Revostock, Pond5, iStock (and many others) they introduced a requirement to show the production/construction of assets, so for an animated robot you'd include a screenshot of your C4D project or a screenshot of your AfterEffects project, for an image of a jungle background plate you'd grab a screenshot of all the Photoshop layers (etc) - a simple proof of the work involved, this was for the vetting procedure only (not for the customer to see) - when this requirement became widespread it also had a noticeable effect on quality, it was harder to get away with grabbing a wood texture off Google Images and uploading it as your own work or buying an AfterEffects template (with obvious parallels here to GS templates) and changing a few elements around and selling it as your own work (which was happening a lot on the stock sites) as there would be numerous clues as to its origin in the construction.

It would be great to see similar technical requirements for audio too, the correct formats for music and audio (MP4/Ogg), or a master WAV/AIFF, nothing under 16bit / 44.1khz / 128 Kbps . . . and so on - I'd even briefly run each piece of submitted audio through a limiter to check RMS and Peak levels (I've bought audio in the past with radically different volume levels and even clipping).

I'm going to guess that people shopping for images/audio (rather than making their own) will often be the kind of people who might be less familiar with things like Photoshop, or why a 257 x 257 pixel asset is less than ideal (or how to resolve an issue like this) - the same deal with music/audio, if the customer buys a piece of music that is 16dB below 0dBFS they may well struggle to know how to get it to play at a reasonable level within GameSalad. So any kind of push towards across the board standards would really help make the Marketplace a viable (and credible!) asset store.

I, for one, welcome our new Marketplace overlords.

dgackey

Everything is going to require direct human intervention at this stage and we're being much more judicious with who is invited to join the vendor program, which will be the first gating mechanism.

At some point we may be able to do some automated technical asset scanning for things like asset resolution and audio parameters, but for now we're simply going to rely on user feedback. Only verified purchasers can review an item, and if we start seeing a lot of negative reviews (or worse) on a particular user's assets, we'll work with them to try and get the issues resolved.

If they don't improve, we'll remove them from the Marketplace -- as simple as that.

We are working on a comprehensive guide that will include best practices for asset creators, what's allowed and not allowed, and so forth -- but ultimately, we are going to expect vendors to hold themselves to high standards and manage their asset sales like a business -- because it is!

PhilipCC

@ForumNinja I agree with @Socks about standards. Here are few ideas.

Publishing or posting a list of minimum requirements for different types of assets would help both the asset developers and the buyers.

A buyer reporting/complaint system for assets that don't meet the requirements would also be useful. The "flag" system introduced in the Forum may be one way to do this.

What about buyer rating and reviews like in iTunes Store?

If GS doesn't have the resources to monitor all of this, maybe some Marketplace (volunteer) monitors could be appointed to check asset submissions?

dgackey

@PhilipCC,

All of those things are in the works.

Socks

@dgackey said:
At some point we may be able to do some automated technical asset scanning for things like asset resolution and audio parameters, but for now we're simply going to rely on user feedback.

That's sounds like a great direction to be going in I presume that if someone uploads a poorly constructed asset (12 frame animation with a glitchy loop and missing frame all rendered at 16.0902ppi ) that it will be subject to a user rating system ? 30 down thumbs and it's pulled (once you've checked it's not the victim of some sort of nefarious campaign and is a perfectly viable asset) ?

@dgackey said:
Only verified purchasers can review an item, and if we start seeing a lot of negative reviews (or worse) on a particular user's assets, we'll work with them to try and get the issues resolved.

Brilliant ! The idea of only verified purchasers being able to feedback is very good too.

@dgackey said:
We are working on a comprehensive guide that will include best practices for asset creators, what's allowed and not allowed, and so forth -- but ultimately, we are going to expect vendors to hold themselves to high standards and manage their asset sales like a business -- because it is!

This all sounds very encouraging !

Braydon_SFX

@dgackey said: We are working on a comprehensive guide that will include best practices for asset creators, what's allowed and not allowed, and so forth -- but ultimately, we are going to expect vendors to hold themselves to high standards and manage their asset sales like a business -- because it is!

+1 !

dgackey

@Socks said:
That's sounds like a great direction to be going in I presume that if someone uploads a poorly constructed asset (12 frame animation with a glitchy loop and missing frame all rendered at 16.0902ppi ) that it will be subject to a user rating system ? 30 down thumbs and it's pulled (once you've checked it's not the victim of some sort of nefarious campaign and is a perfectly viable asset) ?

Yeah, I suppose it's possible that a lot of novices who don't know any better could rate something like that highly while veterans gave it poor ratings, but generally speaking, I think we know that crowdsourced reviews from qualified purchases have a pretty strong correlation to product quality.

We don't have a set threshold where we yank something just yet, but over time we'll formalize the process by which we pull content and warn vendors once we have some baselines.

And we're not going to be arbitrary or capricious -- we want our vendors to be successful and we want our end-user customers to be happy. The only folks I can see having a real issue with this new system are folks whose content just isn't up to the level of quality we expect, but it seems pretty clear to me that the community has spoken and the message is clear there

Summation

@dgackey I'd suggest adopting a dispute resolution system similar to what the BBB uses.

Socks

@dgackey said:
PhilipCC,

All of those things are in the works.

I'd say there was even scope (in the sense that it's technically straightforward) to run all submitted audio through a limiter with its output set to just under 0dBFS, say -0.1 to 0.3dBFS - with no actual limiting applied so the original dynamic range is unaffected (unless it's RMS is way off - say -18dB or whatever) - and then check to see if there is a series of clipped samples longer than X samples (I'd say keep the number low) - but before this limiting you'd roll off everything below 40Hz or so - this would have a minimal effect on the original audio given that a mobile device isn't really going to reproduce anything in that range - and in the overwhelming majority of music/audio that area will mostly be audio sludge that uses up the mobile devices headroom but adds nothing to the audio - cleaning up the sub end would allow much better (louder!) limiting - and without getting too overly technical high-passing would kill any DC offset into the bargain.

This might sound a little involved, but I occasionally have to master music for TV broadcast - and with only a few minutes to do so (!) - and all the above can be done while you are listening to the track - so the process of pushing submitted tracks towards a technical standard can very easily be made part of the vetting process (and not a seperate task).

PhilipCC

@dgackey said:
PhilipCC,

All of those things are in the works.

That's great. I'm looking forward to submitting assets.

Socks

@dgackey said:
Yeah, I suppose it's possible that a lot of novices who don't know any better could rate something like that highly while veterans gave it poor ratings, but generally speaking, I think we know that crowdsourced reviews from qualified purchases have a pretty strong correlation to product quality.

Agreed.

@dgackey said:
We don't have a set threshold where we yank something just yet, but over time we'll formalize the process by which we pull content and warn vendors once we have some baselines.

Will there be monthly executions ? There needs to be monthly executions.

@dgackey said:
And we're not going to be arbitrary or capricious -- we want our vendors to be successful and we want our end-user customers to be happy. The only folks I can see having a real issue with this new system are folks whose content just isn't up to the level of quality we expect, but it seems pretty clear to me that the community has spoken and the message is clear there

Again, agreed . . . in the early days of Stock sites (when they were much much less vetted) the folk who tended to upload poor quality material also tended to do it in bulk, so whereas someone might invest a decent amount of time in designing, constructing and rendering a great model of a spinning dice or watch (or whatever) - and would then upload it to their portfolio of similarly competent assets and move on to the next project . . the junk merchants would instead rush out some low quality crap (perhaps a slightly out of focus, un-coloured-balanced brick texture they took on their phone from a bit too far away, so just zoomed it in with Photoshop), when this was uploaded, they would then upload a red version of the same image, a green version, a blue version, a negative version, a version put through the Photoshop emboss filter . . . . (etc etc) . . . it was amazing how much crap one person can generate if they put their mind to it, these accounts tended to fill up at the rate of 100-200 new assets a week (!), whereas the portfolios with the work you actually wanted to buy might have as few as 1 or 2 new pieces a week (more initially when someone is new to a site) but they became increasingly lost in the landslide of crap which eventually buried everything, but all these sites are 1000 times better these days, with all the various checks and balances.

Lovejoy

@Socks said:
I, for one, welcome our new Marketplace overlords.

Where can i buy this? Its the last piece i needed to complete my LAD clone!

PhilipCC

@Lovejoy said:
Where can I buy this?

Don't buy it, just screenshot it and enlarge it in PS, then make a green one, a blue one, a negative one... >:)

@Socks too.

Socks

@Lovejoy said:
Where can i buy this? Its the last piece i needed to complete my LAD clone!

PM me, I've got a team of low paid, iron shackled, parabola artists waiting for your business.

Socks

@PhilipCC said:
Don't buy it, just screenshot it and enlarge it in PS, then make a green one, a blue one, a negative one . . .

Emboss, that's where the money is !

Lovejoy

@PhilipCC I tried but its watermarked Looks like I will just have to do business with @Socks