@CodeWizard How about this pricing model:
Free - Unlimited free use, but limited number of actors (15 max), scenes (5 max), no device viewers and no publishing.
Develop - Use GameSalad with no publishing ability only testing and developing. No publishing. ($9.99/Mo)
Basic - Features of previously free version (publish to iOS, arcade, viewers etc ...)
Pro.
Ultimate - Offline Build, custom Lua code and native libraries, etc...
@CobraBlade said:
I see... well I guess it's bye bye GameSalad. But want to say thank you to everyone in the community and the GS team themselves. Was fun while it lasted.
That's a shame I thought Soulless was looking great, I was looking forward to playing it !!
That's really awesome of you to say @Socks and very appreciated. I did finish it before now fortunately, so it can be found on the App Stores as well as some smaller stores like Desura.
I just wish we still had free unlimited use of the Creators and Viewers... there are years between my games... so GameSalad is unfortunately making itself too expensive, but if I could still work on my games, and just go Pro when I needed to publish or update games created with it... now that I could live with.
@CobraBlade said:
I just wish we still had free unlimited use of the Creators and Viewers... there are years between my games... so GameSalad is unfortunately making itself too expensive, but if I could still work on my games, and just go Pro when I needed to publish or update games created with it... now that I could live with.
Sad to see any member leave. Perhaps just go Basic the months you plan to work on your game, and Pro for the month you plan to publish? Good chance it would actually work out cheaper for you.
For those that complain about GS's "errors", here is one that occured with Unity, on a much grander and harder to contain scale for the users of the program. Forcing them to either adapt or go back to an older version.
Note the level of difficulty regarding the "error" or "obstacle" that occured for this group of develoeprs, and note that they themeselves are willing to solve it or find a workaround on their own instead of sitting it out or quitting. : X
All game making programs have probs, some on a grander, more difficult scale, there won't be a greener grass on any other field. Just Pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses.
@Franto said:
All game making programs have probs, some on a grander, more difficult scale, there won't be a greener grass on any other field. Just Pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses.
Every tool has issues and you need to find work arounds. We use a piece of software to make another piece of software ... And every piece of software has bugs ... The trick is to avoid them and if you are lucky you don't encounter them ...
@neoman Your reply confuses me. Isn't that what I said, lol, or you are just adding to my words? : )
Anyway, my message is for those that think there's something better than GS or think GS is inferior in some way and then quit. GS excels in many things other similar programs aren't anywhere near to it.
I'm always finding work arounds, I don't sit and quit if I hit a wall, and I don't complain about anything. I recognize the hard work put into something and don't act like there could be more to it easily. I work within the strengths of a program, rather than trying to use it's weaknesses.
Ok, now I'm confused again. Do you have to be online each time you use GS to validate your license? If so, what is "offline mode" and what are its' restrictions?
If this is true and the "offline mode" is restrictive, GS needs to seriously evaluate new pricing model.
@Pesto said:
Ok, now I'm confused again. Do you have to be online each time you use GS to validate your license? If so, what is "offline mode" and what are its' restrictions?
If this is true and the "offline mode" is restrictive, GS needs to seriously evaluate new pricing model.
Offline mode means you can use GS Creator without an Internet connection, noting more, nothing less. You can do everything, no limitations, except publishing, obviously.
Every time you DO log in with a net connection, it validates offline use for 7 days (I think) from that moment. That means it is possible to use GS pretty much entitely offline, as long as you log in for 5 seconds every week.
@The_Gamesalad_Guru said:
As to fonts. More fuzzy fonts do absolutely no good. I rarely use the fonts they suck and make a game look second rate. I'd rather see them get more facebook or multiplayer back in than waste lots of time providing more fuzzy fonts. That makes no sense to me either.
Fonts aren't fuzzy if you set your "stage" (or the camera width and height, basically) to be a higher resolution. The fonts render relative to the pixel size of the scene. So if your "camera width and height" are 480x320, the fonts will look terrible when you run the game on an iPhone 4. If your "camera width and height are, say 1920x1080, the fonts will look crisp and lovely.
Give it a try. do an experiment. I think it's good to make the scene larger than it needs to be, wherever possible.
Basically, as has been discussed above, the fonts are rendered as images, then rendered onscreen. And the size of the images used for the fonts is based on the amount of pixels they're taking up onscreen. So zoom your camera back, make your actors take up more "pixel space" on the stage, and they'll look good.
The thing is, making a set of numbers (as images) for a score is all good and well.
But there's no "practical" way to build a custom font which can render any and all arbitrary text.
Does anyone have a suggestion, for example, of how you would render a dialog system using a custom made pixel font (made up of characters that are individual images)?
@supafly129 said:
At this point I would still prefer memory leak fixes and better loading times. For bigger games, there's only so much optimization you can do before you pull your hair out. What good are custom fonts/custom collisions if your game crashes? At least custom fonts/custom collisions have workarounds even if a bit tedious
I worked on a game for about 2 years, then a Game Salad update killed it, so it crashes after a few levels, due to bugs in the table memory allocation and cleanup. (My game procedurally builds each level, using a big mission table, but it's never cleaned up properly at each scene change.)
Game Salad have not fixed it, despite years of my extensive bug reports and giving them versions of my project to test against. I never even heard back from them about it. They never said they pulled it up on the test bench. They've just completely ignored me.
All they had to do was run the project, debug the issue, fix it, release a patch, and everyone benefits.
But no. My project is RIP.
How can I recommend that product to anyone, when it has killed my project?
No amount of new features can be balanced up against such a fascicle disrespect for a paying customer.
@pHghost said:
But what Socks says about the Display Text behavior is interesting, wouldn't think it would be such a drain. It all probably comes down to the fact that the rendering isn't native. Even though current generation iPhones are way ahead of iPhone 4 in terms of performance and the effects might not be that visible anymore, it doesn't change the fact that the processing drain is still there!
In the past, I've definitely found "Display Text" behaviours to slow down my games. On Android, it was absolutely killing the device. That was a long time ago. I don't find it problematic anymore.
@pHghost said:
Support for Spriter would be well appreciated, though, as well as Tiled.
I use Tiled for my game. I requested that the developer of Tiled (Bjorn, I think) add support to export to CSV, and he did (very quickly - not something I'm used to around here at GS land)...
Now I can export my Tiled map to a CSV, outputting the names of the files themselves to each cell. [You can add a property to each tile, call it "name", and just add the filename there. Then when you output CSV, it'll use the "name" property instead of an ID number.]
Then my game refers to the cell names as the image names, to display my map squares. Works great. Thank god someone responds to feature requests.
This is an early teaser trailer for that game... one of the things I still want to get finished with Game Salad... it's a bit dinky currently! Lots still to do.
This is the game that is currently lying dead on a slab in the morgue, due to table related memory cleanup problems that got introduced about a year or more ago, and has not been fixed... so much work has gone into it... but I cannot work on it anymore. Not a great feeling, let me tell you.
If Game Salad were to implement support for custom fonts, there could be a variety of ways they might do it. And allowing users to click "Import Font", and then point to a TTF (TrueType Font), and bring it in, and then start using it in Display Text behaviours is one thing.
That is NOT the same as adding full support for sprite sheets, etc.
some of the background tech for GS to be able to USE a sprite sheet is one thing, but adding user friendly implementations of a user interface, and ways for the user to define how various sprites are defined and used is completely another thing.
I'm no expert, but one does not simply provide the other, for free.
@Armelline said: I lead the crusade for real custom fonts.
All good.
dgackeyAustin, TXInactive, PRO, Chef EmeritusPosts: 699
edited July 2015
@Hymloe said:
They never said they pulled it up on the test bench. They've just completely ignored me.
Actually, a number of GS programmers and staff including Alan, Brian, and Jonathan have looked at your game in the past, but my understanding was that their primary recommendation has always been that you should rearchitect the game.
As I understood the feedback, the way you've currently implemented things with that game and the scope of what you're trying to do are just fundamentally in conflict with each other and weren't likely to be easy fixes.
I would also submit that the concessions I've personally made to you contradict the concept that you have been "completely ignored".
But I definitely understand your frustration! (as I said to you the last time we discussed your situation!)
Dan Magaha · COO · GameSalad, Inc · danm@gamesalad.com
@dgackey said:
But I definitely understand your frustration! (as I said to you the last time we discussed your situation!)
Thanks for the reply.
The thing is, the exact same project played through 40+ missions one day, then only about 3 or 4 in the next build. No changes at my end.
I believe @Hopscotch made a test project, with just one simple scene that illustrated a test case for the issue, that wasn't predicated on a complex game (which I'll admit mine is).
So it seemed that a fix could have been imminent if acted upon from that test case.
I know my project would be overwhelming to someone not familiar with the project.
But as I said, the project worked fine on one version of GS, and with subsequent updates, some watershed moment brought with it some code element which meant that memory just kept building up, and didn't get cleaned up.
Nothing I could do about it.
I believe it was synced with the switch to LUA-jit, or something. Not really sure.
I feel that it all comes down to the issue I've seen in various games companies I've worked at. Programmers say, "It's impossible to fix that."
Then you hand it to the experienced "can do" programmer who sits next to that person, and it's fixed in a day. Because they just looked at the problem the right way, tried the right tests, isolated it, fixed it.
My hands are tied.
Before I became a game designer, I was QA lead for 4 years at a studio making games for Windows, PS2, Xbox, iPhone, Nintendo DS, GBA... I worked closely with all members of all sorts of teams. Clear as day, I can see it, smell it, yet my hands are tied. This problem can be fixed if debugged properly.
I don't understand the stonewall. You just run the project, look at the memory allocating, and never getting cleaned up. And find out why. And fix it.
I can't guarantee that his test project is exactly the same case as the problem I have in my project, but it seems a good place to start. And he came up with that demo after examining my project, along with his other explorations and tests.
So I really had hope that he'd nailed the issue down to a specific scenario.
@Hymloe said:
The thing is, making a set of numbers (as images) for a score is all good and well. But there's no "practical" way to build a custom font which can render any and all arbitrary text.
I'm not sure how Approw's comment: "Having multiple text behaviors when the actual game is not being played would not be an issue at all" is saying 'there's no practical way to build a custom font' ?
On the subject of custom fonts (or any currently used / recommended custom font method) not being applicable to text, you're a bit late to the party here, this has been something I've been saying for years (literally years), that these methods are only applicable to (mainly monspaced) numbers.
@Socks Sorry for not coming back to you after your last response to me, I was insanely busy.
You are responding to me saying 'I don't understand what this means' (in response to Approw's comment: "Having multiple text behaviors when the actual game is not being played would not be an issue at all") ? I'm not sure how his comment is saying 'there's no practical way to build a custom font' ?
@Hymloe I was not referring to custom text fonts or anything specifically. I was talking about using the display text behavior outside of the actual gameplay (custom or no custom font), so in the main menu for example. The player probably wont even notice if there are framedrops in the menu's. As long as the display text behavior's don't affect the "actual" gameplay, its all good;) Besides that, I think everyone would love to see custom fonts, at least I do:D
Comments
@CodeWizard How about this pricing model:
Free - Unlimited free use, but limited number of actors (15 max), scenes (5 max), no device viewers and no publishing.
Develop - Use GameSalad with no publishing ability only testing and developing. No publishing. ($9.99/Mo)
Basic - Features of previously free version (publish to iOS, arcade, viewers etc ...)
Pro.
Ultimate - Offline Build, custom Lua code and native libraries, etc...
That's a shame
I thought Soulless was looking great, I was looking forward to playing it !!
That's really awesome of you to say @Socks and very appreciated. I did finish it before now fortunately, so it can be found on the App Stores as well as some smaller stores like Desura.
I just wish we still had free unlimited use of the Creators and Viewers... there are years between my games... so GameSalad is unfortunately making itself too expensive, but if I could still work on my games, and just go Pro when I needed to publish or update games created with it... now that I could live with.
Sad to see any member leave. Perhaps just go Basic the months you plan to work on your game, and Pro for the month you plan to publish? Good chance it would actually work out cheaper for you.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/AvimaanSyam/20150716/248685/Breaking_the_Laws_of_Physics.php
For those that complain about GS's "errors", here is one that occured with Unity, on a much grander and harder to contain scale for the users of the program. Forcing them to either adapt or go back to an older version.
Note the level of difficulty regarding the "error" or "obstacle" that occured for this group of develoeprs, and note that they themeselves are willing to solve it or find a workaround on their own instead of sitting it out or quitting. : X
All game making programs have probs, some on a grander, more difficult scale, there won't be a greener grass on any other field. Just Pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses.
Every tool has issues and you need to find work arounds. We use a piece of software to make another piece of software ... And every piece of software has bugs ... The trick is to avoid them and if you are lucky you don't encounter them ...
Free Mini Games and Demo Templates
@neoman Your reply confuses me.
Isn't that what I said, lol, or you are just adding to my words? : )
Anyway, my message is for those that think there's something better than GS or think GS is inferior in some way and then quit. GS excels in many things other similar programs aren't anywhere near to it.
I'm always finding work arounds, I don't sit and quit if I hit a wall, and I don't complain about anything. I recognize the hard work put into something and don't act like there could be more to it easily. I work within the strengths of a program, rather than trying to use it's weaknesses.
Ok, now I'm confused again. Do you have to be online each time you use GS to validate your license? If so, what is "offline mode" and what are its' restrictions?
If this is true and the "offline mode" is restrictive, GS needs to seriously evaluate new pricing model.
Offline mode means you can use GS Creator without an Internet connection, noting more, nothing less. You can do everything, no limitations, except publishing, obviously.
Every time you DO log in with a net connection, it validates offline use for 7 days (I think) from that moment. That means it is possible to use GS pretty much entitely offline, as long as you log in for 5 seconds every week.
Ok thanks pHghost. Freaked for a second
You got it. I'm adding to your words. I agree with what you said ...
Free Mini Games and Demo Templates
@neoman Ok, I see.
This is probably the longest state of Gamesalad I've ever seen.
No there have been way longer..lol
Guru Video Channel | Lost Oasis Games | FRYING BACON STUDIOS
@The_Gamesalad_Guru I see, I guess it's because I've only been around about 1 year, 8 months, lol.
Fonts aren't fuzzy if you set your "stage" (or the camera width and height, basically) to be a higher resolution. The fonts render relative to the pixel size of the scene. So if your "camera width and height" are 480x320, the fonts will look terrible when you run the game on an iPhone 4. If your "camera width and height are, say 1920x1080, the fonts will look crisp and lovely.
Give it a try. do an experiment. I think it's good to make the scene larger than it needs to be, wherever possible.
Basically, as has been discussed above, the fonts are rendered as images, then rendered onscreen. And the size of the images used for the fonts is based on the amount of pixels they're taking up onscreen. So zoom your camera back, make your actors take up more "pixel space" on the stage, and they'll look good.
The thing is, making a set of numbers (as images) for a score is all good and well.
But there's no "practical" way to build a custom font which can render any and all arbitrary text.
Does anyone have a suggestion, for example, of how you would render a dialog system using a custom made pixel font (made up of characters that are individual images)?
I didn't think so. ;P
I worked on a game for about 2 years, then a Game Salad update killed it, so it crashes after a few levels, due to bugs in the table memory allocation and cleanup. (My game procedurally builds each level, using a big mission table, but it's never cleaned up properly at each scene change.)
Game Salad have not fixed it, despite years of my extensive bug reports and giving them versions of my project to test against. I never even heard back from them about it. They never said they pulled it up on the test bench. They've just completely ignored me.
All they had to do was run the project, debug the issue, fix it, release a patch, and everyone benefits.
But no. My project is RIP.
How can I recommend that product to anyone, when it has killed my project?
No amount of new features can be balanced up against such a fascicle disrespect for a paying customer.
In the past, I've definitely found "Display Text" behaviours to slow down my games. On Android, it was absolutely killing the device. That was a long time ago. I don't find it problematic anymore.
I use Tiled for my game. I requested that the developer of Tiled (Bjorn, I think) add support to export to CSV, and he did (very quickly - not something I'm used to around here at GS land)...
Now I can export my Tiled map to a CSV, outputting the names of the files themselves to each cell. [You can add a property to each tile, call it "name", and just add the filename there. Then when you output CSV, it'll use the "name" property instead of an ID number.]
Then my game refers to the cell names as the image names, to display my map squares. Works great. Thank god someone responds to feature requests.
This is an early teaser trailer for that game... one of the things I still want to get finished with Game Salad... it's a bit dinky currently! Lots still to do.
This is the game that is currently lying dead on a slab in the morgue, due to table related memory cleanup problems that got introduced about a year or more ago, and has not been fixed... so much work has gone into it... but I cannot work on it anymore. Not a great feeling, let me tell you.
The two aren't the same.
If Game Salad were to implement support for custom fonts, there could be a variety of ways they might do it. And allowing users to click "Import Font", and then point to a TTF (TrueType Font), and bring it in, and then start using it in Display Text behaviours is one thing.
That is NOT the same as adding full support for sprite sheets, etc.
some of the background tech for GS to be able to USE a sprite sheet is one thing, but adding user friendly implementations of a user interface, and ways for the user to define how various sprites are defined and used is completely another thing.
I'm no expert, but one does not simply provide the other, for free.
I never said it was.
I lead the crusade for real custom fonts. You don't have to tell me.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
All good.
Actually, a number of GS programmers and staff including Alan, Brian, and Jonathan have looked at your game in the past, but my understanding was that their primary recommendation has always been that you should rearchitect the game.
As I understood the feedback, the way you've currently implemented things with that game and the scope of what you're trying to do are just fundamentally in conflict with each other and weren't likely to be easy fixes.
I would also submit that the concessions I've personally made to you contradict the concept that you have been "completely ignored".
But I definitely understand your frustration! (as I said to you the last time we discussed your situation!)
Dan Magaha · COO · GameSalad, Inc · danm@gamesalad.com
Thanks for the reply.
The thing is, the exact same project played through 40+ missions one day, then only about 3 or 4 in the next build. No changes at my end.
I believe @Hopscotch made a test project, with just one simple scene that illustrated a test case for the issue, that wasn't predicated on a complex game (which I'll admit mine is).
So it seemed that a fix could have been imminent if acted upon from that test case.
I know my project would be overwhelming to someone not familiar with the project.
But as I said, the project worked fine on one version of GS, and with subsequent updates, some watershed moment brought with it some code element which meant that memory just kept building up, and didn't get cleaned up.
Nothing I could do about it.
I believe it was synced with the switch to LUA-jit, or something. Not really sure.
I feel that it all comes down to the issue I've seen in various games companies I've worked at. Programmers say, "It's impossible to fix that."
Then you hand it to the experienced "can do" programmer who sits next to that person, and it's fixed in a day. Because they just looked at the problem the right way, tried the right tests, isolated it, fixed it.
My hands are tied.
Before I became a game designer, I was QA lead for 4 years at a studio making games for Windows, PS2, Xbox, iPhone, Nintendo DS, GBA... I worked closely with all members of all sorts of teams. Clear as day, I can see it, smell it, yet my hands are tied. This problem can be fixed if debugged properly.
I don't understand the stonewall. You just run the project, look at the memory allocating, and never getting cleaned up. And find out why. And fix it.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/77667/stable-release-macintosh-gamesalad-creator-0-12-20/p7
Scroll down to (or search for)...
TableMemTest_0_13_2_p.zip
When @Hopscotch did that thorough troubleshooting and identifying issues, I really thought that the wait was coming to and end.
A fix was even announced as being worked on. Then... nothing. Months and months continue to go by.
I can't guarantee that his test project is exactly the same case as the problem I have in my project, but it seems a good place to start. And he came up with that demo after examining my project, along with his other explorations and tests.
So I really had hope that he'd nailed the issue down to a specific scenario.
I'm not sure how Approw's comment: "Having multiple text behaviors when the actual game is not being played would not be an issue at all" is saying 'there's no practical way to build a custom font' ?
On the subject of custom fonts (or any currently used / recommended custom font method) not being applicable to text, you're a bit late to the party here, this has been something I've been saying for years (literally years), that these methods are only applicable to (mainly monspaced) numbers.
@Socks Sorry for not coming back to you after your last response to me, I was insanely busy.
@Hymloe I was not referring to custom text fonts or anything specifically. I was talking about using the display text behavior outside of the actual gameplay (custom or no custom font), so in the main menu for example. The player probably wont even notice if there are framedrops in the menu's. As long as the display text behavior's don't affect the "actual" gameplay, its all good;) Besides that, I think everyone would love to see custom fonts, at least I do:D