Mac Release 0.13.40 is available

QASalad

Mac Release 0.13.40 is available

Fix:

• Fixed Drag and Drop functionality breaking if images were dragged from the Library to the Scene Editor or Actor Inspector.

Download the build here

Previous Release Notes: https://gamesalad.com/download/releaseNotes/creator

Armelline

Excellent!

Thunder_Child

thank you so much...you guys really are making the creator better each day....we all really appreciate it.

QASalad

@Thunder_Child said:
thank you so much...you guys really are making the creator better each day....we all really appreciate it.

Hopefully it resolves the issues you were seeing in .39....

Socks

@QASalad said:
Hopefully it resolves the issues you were seeing in .39....

Should have said 'sensing', "Hopefully it resolves the issues you were sensing in .39", would have been much more Star Wars.

Braydon_SFX

Whoop!

PhilipCC

Exciting. New releases are coming out faster than I can download and try them out.

Maybe that's the new plan, we won't notice the bugs if we have a new version each day! >:)

Armelline

I notice that you can now copy what's in an expression in one project, and paste it into an expression in another project. Obviously attributes are lost, but the structure of the expression is preserved. I don't know when this became a thing, but I like it!

Edit: Seems to sometimes crash GameSalad, but I still like it!

neoman

The GS team are on fire! I can smell the smoke from here ... Thank you and keep up the good work ...

KevinCross

Deleted comment

tanert

Hello everyone.

I am preparing a game. I updated the gamesalad to verison 0.13.40. When I pressed to webpreview the game is working without problem but when I pressed Ipad Landscape there are missing actors and pictures. Is anyone expose the problem like that?

supafly129

@QASalad said:
Hopefully it resolves the issues you were seeing in .39....

@QASalad Any updates on the increase in loading times between scenes (seems to be an issue since 0.13.34)? This is being experienced with ad hoc build

Thunder_Child

@QASalad said:
Hopefully it resolves the issues you were seeing in .39....

It did indeed fix that exact issue.

NimbleBug

@supafly129 said:
QASalad Any updates on the increase in loading times between scenes (seems to be an issue since 0.13.34)? This is being experienced with ad hoc build

@QASalad ?

Armelline

The loading time issue really needs to be addressed. I raised it as the biggest drawback of GameSalad back when the subscription fuss was happening, and it's only got worse since then.

My games take 5-10x as long to load with GameSalad as they would with native code and at least 2-3x as long as with the closest competing engines. I've lost more than a few clients who have had me make a game for them and then cited the loading times (initial load particularly) as the reason they're moving to other dev environments. You can cut them down by manipulating what's loaded when in that initial scene, but the bottom line is they're LONG.

supafly129

@Armelline said:
The loading time issue really needs to be addressed. I raised it as the biggest drawback of GameSalad back when the subscription fuss was happening, and it's only got worse since then.

My games take 5-10x as long to load with GameSalad as they would with native code and at least 2-3x as long as with the closest competing engines. I've lost more than a few clients who have had me make a game for them and then cited the loading times (initial load particularly) as the reason they're moving to other dev environments. You can cut them down by manipulating what's loaded when in that initial scene, but the bottom line is they're LONG.

Agreed--i filed a bug below since loading times seemed to have recently doubled:

http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1378

Loading times are unfortunately the only thing preventing my game from being a completely enjoyable experience because they've gone from somewhat tolerable to totally unbearable without any changes to code, and like @Armelline mentioned even manipulations for what's loaded when only helps so much. Please look into this as soon as possible.

I know some new awesome features are in the works but I personally think we already have most of what we need to make awesome games. Now that memory leaks have been fixed which is HUGE in itself, i think improved loading times is something everyone would extremely appreciate (not only GS members but players/customers/clients of GS members as well). I know the staff has been working incredibly hard so don't want to minimize that in any way but hoping the loading time issue doesn't fall under the radar to other less important things.

EireStudios

Thanks for the release! Is there any chance we could get a roadmap or state of game salad post going? I bought the full monthly pro to support you guys and I was hoping that with @CodeWizard as the new main man things would get better, and for the most part (big squashing) it has! But please guys all I ask for is a little input once in a while as to what's happening with new features etc I will always continue to support ye because let's face it GS is still a fantastic engine, but I would still love to see the weekly updates make a come back pleasssssse

vafurlogi

@Armelline said:
The loading time issue really needs to be addressed. I raised it as the biggest drawback of GameSalad back when the subscription fuss was happening, and it's only got worse since then.

My games take 5-10x as long to load with GameSalad as they would with native code and at least 2-3x as long as with the closest competing engines. I've lost more than a few clients who have had me make a game for them and then cited the loading times (initial load particularly) as the reason they're moving to other dev environments. You can cut them down by manipulating what's loaded when in that initial scene, but the bottom line is they're LONG.

GameSalad staff have been good at communicating on the forums recently, but I haven't seen anything mentioned about these crazy loading times.

I'm making an app now that has 5 small games for kids. One of them is a maths game that has fairly light graphics but quite a bit of logic and tables to work with. The loading times on that game alone are almost 20 seconds on Ipad 3. Most kids have exited the app before that.

NimbleBug

@vafurlogi said:
I'm making an app now that has 5 small games for kids. One of them is a maths game that has fairly light graphics but quite a bit of logic and tables to work with. The loading times on that game alone are almost 20 seconds on Ipad 3. Most kids have exited the app before that.

same with my apps, no more new features...first improve loading time and scene changing time.

GeorgeGS

@NimbleBug said:
same with my apps, no more new features...first improve loading time and scene changing time.

The loading time was not substantially different for me when I was testing with the two projects I was sent when I asked for projects that ran out of memory.

You can always attach your projects to the bug so that when we are testing we have some problem cases. Only GameSalad employees have access to attached files.

Thunder_Child

Not a single crash for me tonight yet....no expired sessions requiring additional logins....so for now I can go ahead and say good job on this build..:-)

Armelline

@GeorgeGS said:
The loading time was not substantially different for me when I was testing with the two projects I was sent when I asked for projects that ran out of memory.

Different between what and what?

Even at their best though, they're still too long

33miles

@GeorgeGS @QASalad I really need some help please! I updated to GS 0.13.40 from 0.13.36 yesterday, and have worked with it for about 8 hours with no crashes and really good performance for most things. But just a few minutes ago a horrible thing happened! I had two projects opened side by side referencing from one and working on the other, and after a while of work I saved inside of an actor for the project I was adding code and tables to. I then clicked the scene dropdown list and noticed all of the scene screenshots were gone... Then after getting out of that actor and back to one of my scenes there was no artwork present in that scene or the entire project!!!! The whole image library shows all of my hundreds of images with just a simple asset missing logo on each one!!! Please all you GS devs and smart people let me know if there is a way to recover my project. I would be extremely grateful for any help.

I have never had anything like this happen in my 1+ years of making games with the many GS versions until now... Thanks for reading.

NimbleBug

@Armelline said:

Different between what and what?

Even at their best though, they're still too long

That is what i am saying,i am not comparing with other versions,it is very slow when compared with other engines, other than that Gamesalad can do awesome stuff.As day by day phones and tablets are offering quad core...and high RAMs ...people expect to open apps fast...and change scenes fast and they don't want to see loading wheel in Samsung galaxy s6,or in iPad pro.And as Gamesalad said earlier The new rendering system bla bla bla....what happened to this is it coming ?

@Toyman said:
Socks

The new rendering system breaks an image up into 64x64 tiles that are LZ4_HC compressed so they should be comparable to PNGs. Tiles are streamed into one to four large mega textures of 2048x2048 apiece, which is the maximum texture size on most mobile devices. So you can fit 4096 tiles into memory at once. If you have more than 4096 tiles the older tiles will be evicted from memory and new tiles streamed in to take their place. So you never run out of texture memory ever! That's one big advantage. Memory doesn't really matter any more. Your scene can be as big as you like. What you'll see is a slight pause in the frame rate whenever you load new tiles from disk but it's not a huge pause.

The other main advantage to the new rendering system is speed. Almost everything on the screen in your game will be issued to the GPU with one draw call. Awesome batching madness.

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/86687/state-of-gamesalad-on-5-29-2015/p2

@vafurlogi @Toyman @Armelline @GeorgeGS @BlackCloakGS

Thanks

CodeWizard

Yeah, load times on the runtime engine will be getting some attention shortly. I've got a hunch on what the cause is. It's gonna take some profiling though. Right now we're putting the finishing touches on a major update to Windows Creator. Once we're done with that (and other iOS 9 / El Capitan issues) then we can give it some love.

NimbleBug

@CodeWizard Thank you
so, is it going to have The new rendering system ? what ever mentioned on state-of-gamesalad-on-5-29-2015

GeorgeGS

@Armelline said:
Different between what and what?

Between never unloading anything and running out of memory and what we have now.

This bug http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1378 says loading times have doubled. I'm not saying that isn't possible, but I did not see that with the two projects I was testing with.

As you all know, there's more than one way to make a game, so the more projects I have available to test with the better.

Even at their best though, they're still too long

I won't argue with that either. There is always room for optimization, but what makes one game load faster may make little to no difference on another. Hopefully we'll be able to catch the most common causes of slowdowns and try to smooth those out.

GeorgeGS

@33miles said:
GeorgeGS QASalad I really need some help please! I updated to GS 0.13.40 from 0.13.36 yesterday, and have worked with it for about 8 hours with no crashes and really good performance for most things. But just a few minutes ago a horrible thing happened! I had two projects opened side by side referencing from one and working on the other, and after a while of work I saved inside of an actor for the project I was adding code and tables to. I then clicked the scene dropdown list and noticed all of the scene screenshots were gone... Then after getting out of that actor and back to one of my scenes there was no artwork present in that scene or the entire project!!!! The whole image library shows all of my hundreds of images with just a simple asset missing logo on each one!!! Please all you GS devs and smart people let me know if there is a way to recover my project. I would be extremely grateful for any help.

I have never had anything like this happen in my 1+ years of making games with the many GS versions until now... Thanks for reading.

If you contact customer service (question mark in the lower right) and send them your project we can take a look, but it's hard to know what happened based on what you're describing so I'm not sure what we can do.

If you've ever published the game you can go to your publishing profile and download those versions of the project, but as many people have found, it's always very important to keep up to date backups and periodic snapshots via save-as.

We're doing the best we can to make Creator stable, but we can't protect against the occasional mistake. Believe me, I've lost tons of code over the years for various reasons, and I know it's tough, but hopefully you have something to go back to.

NimbleBug

@GeorgeGS i don't know why , no one is answering about new rendering system , is it stopped or coming soon ? because it was mentioned earlier that " The other main advantage to the new rendering system is speed "

neoman

@NimbleBug said:
GeorgeGS i don't know why , no one is answering about new rendering system , is it stopped or coming soon ? because it was mentioned earlier that " The other main advantage to the new rendering system is speed "

Socks asked about this before. I think Codewizard's reply was it will NOT be implemented since toyman (The guy implementing it) left GS. I remember reading it at some stage. Also I think there were issues implementing it on the Windows version of Creator and it had to be rolled back but it is better if you get some clarification from the GS staff.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

I was recently able to obtain the gamesalad road map through a freedom of information request. Here is the copy. As you can see it is heavily redacted.... ; )