Thanks again @Armelline . I did a find and replace on all the XML docs in a copy of the project file and that seemed to do the trick. I won't be working on this file any more just in case. But nice to remove some of the slowness in my Android build for the moment anyway. I'll just have to focus on iOS until they get this worked out. Too bad though- just got Twitter, IAP and GameCircle working well on Android and was contemplating releasing on Android first. Well, we'll see how quickly this gets resolved. Hopefully by the time I am ready to go, they'll have it fixed. Anyway, thanks again!
I suggested this as a work around for load times, but this time with a twist. What if it was on GS's side, where it uses the actor system, and has a "actor" that loads first by itself in an empty scene in order to reduce load time from one scene to another, then once the empty scene is loaded, loads everything else, of course, this would mean that within the scene, there would be lag until everything loads, but you'd have a second actor that is preloaded, called "load screen", covering up the loading of everything, and disappears when everything else is loaded. This would allow people to be able to use custom loading screens graphics.
Although might be moot if the new optimizations reduce load times significantly.
@Franto said:
I suggested this as a work around for load times, but this time with a twist. What if it was on GS's side, where it uses the actor system, and has a "actor" that loads first by itself in an empty scene in order to reduce load time from one scene to another, then once the empty scene is loaded, loads everything else, of course, this would mean that within the scene, there would be lag until everything loads, but you'd have a second actor that is preloaded, called "load screen", covering up the loading of everything, and disappears when everything else is loaded. This would allow people to be able to use custom loading screens graphics.
If you trigger the display of a loading screen image before calling the change scene, this can have a similar effect.
@Armelline Thanks! Never thought of that, now I can use all this unused art relating to my game as random loading screens.
@Agent Argyle Did you go into each file manually? You can do that change in less than a minute using Dreamweaver and ctrl+f, select the "folder" option, and just put the appropriate code in the find and replace fields, dreamweaver will search out all instances of that xml code, and replace it. I managed to add a game.attribute into the expression field for the volume of all sound behaviors found through out 200 actors/files in seconds that way.
@Franto No, I did it just as you did. But thanks for the tip - I hadn't considered editing a project that way. In general though, I tend to stay away from sweeping Find & Replace operations since it can be destructive if patterns don't match perfectly. I'd be worried that I'd inadvertently corrupt my project that way. Its fine this once since I just needed it temporarily on a copy of my project to spit out a faster Android build. On the other hand, it would be the only way to edit all the colors or all the fonts at once in GS since those attributes don't take expressions, so again, thanks for the tip!
You can also target an older version, if you can't downgrade Creator, by uploading manually on the publishing portfolio page and entering the version number you want to target. As long as you don't depend on any features newer than the release, you should be good.
@Agent Argyle Yeah, I know what you mean about it having to match exactly, but as long as the person pays attention to how it is written, it will work.
For example, a very hard thing to convert was % operators to mod functions. Very difficult, as I had to do it in two sections, as it's impossible to do in a single sweep.
Basically the first half of the code was replaced, then I had to carefully pinpoint the other half and replace those. It was due to the x,y of the mod function being the only unique part that I could only change what was "around" the numbers in XML. But doing each half of it made sure to only catch all instances of the % in the expression editor field in the project and nothing else, due to how uniquely written it is as well as making sure all of them within the project were found. My skills are limited though, find and replace along with copy and pasting attributes is all I can do in XML. {For example, if you have a lot of attributes, you can change their order and organize them in XML without it affecting the game.}
Dreamweaver was a huge time saver, otherwise, I would still be using % operators.
You can also target an older version, if you can't downgrade Creator, by uploading manually on the publishing portfolio page and entering the version number you want to target. As long as you don't depend on any features newer than the release, you should be good.
Well... unfortunately this method did not work for me. I manually uploaded my .gameproj file by dragging and dropping it onto the portfolio page. A popup asked me which version I wanted to target, so I entered 1.23.1 and then got the page where it asks you whether you'd like to update an existing project or create a new one. I created a new one and copied over all the settings from the original for my API keys and such. I generated a new APK for Android and installed it manually, but it only got to the splash screen before crashing.
Maybe my project uses some new functionality I wasn't aware of, or maybe I did something else wrong, but so far I have not gotten this method to work. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is able to use this method to spit out builds using older versions of the game engine.
FYI. We're doing some weekend work on profiling / optimizing the engine even further. Can't wait to see how you guys enjoy it next week. I also hear a little bird talking about custom fonts. For Christmas?
And, I was poking around the code for old PGFC. There's some pretty cool stuff in there. Wonder how we might be able to use that? Hmmm. The mind boggles.
@pHghost PGFC is an older project that would take your game project and build a highly optimized binary for them. Can't really use it outright but there are some potentially useful C++ ports of low-level GameSalad Lua code in there. Might be something we can utilize.
@CodeWizard said:
FYI. We're doing some weekend work on profiling / optimizing the engine even further. Can't wait to see how you guys enjoy it next week. I also hear a little bird talking about custom fonts. For Christmas?
@CodeWizard said:
FYI. We're doing some weekend work on profiling / optimizing the engine even further. Can't wait to see how you guys enjoy it next week. I also hear a little bird talking about custom fonts. For Christmas?
And, I was poking around the code for old PGFC. There's some pretty cool stuff in there. Wonder how we might be able to use that? Hmmm. The mind boggles.
Awesome ,I hope home my dream comes true with this ,scene loading time changes..so that i no need to worry about doing kids apps.Because in my apps while changing scene kids are not looking for loading they are continuously taping.
@pHghost PGFC is an older project that would take your game project and build a highly optimized binary for them. Can't really use it outright but there are some potentially useful C++ ports of low-level GameSalad Lua code in there. Might be something we can utilize.
What would highly optimized binaries mean in practical terms ?
Awesome ,I hope home my dream comes true with this ,scene loading time changes..so that i no need to worry about doing kids apps.Because in my apps while changing scene kids are not looking for loading they are continuously taping.
I noticed the same thing in testing. Though adults also miss the spinning wheel in the corner.
@Agent Argyle that is why i added my own loading image.For adults it is working fine...with kids it is very difficult because they don't think this is another app they want same results as all other apps in terms of loading .
@pHghost PGFC is an older project that would take your game project and build a highly optimized binary for them. Can't really use it outright but there are some potentially useful C++ ports of low-level GameSalad Lua code in there. Might be something we can utilize.
What would highly optimized binaries mean in practical terms ?
I am just hoping that android games will work smoothly with the next update like with the previous GS version. My game is now absolutely unplayable and terribly slow (I do not use any custom collisions). ;-) I know it is under investigation now, just agree with others...
@CodeWizard said:
FYI. We're doing some weekend work on profiling / optimizing the engine even further. Can't wait to see how you guys enjoy it next week. I also hear a little bird talking about custom fonts. For Christmas?
And, I was poking around the code for old PGFC. There's some pretty cool stuff in there. Wonder how we might be able to use that? Hmmm. The mind boggles.
Custom fonts?? Man .. I'm trying to learn C# and move to Unity but you're giving me reasons not to! :P
Custom fonts?!? Love seeing the forward momentum. The pgfc sounds interesting, why was the project stopped in 2012? Hopefully it's not a moonshot that we will never get our hands on.
Comments
Are you using the Gamesalad plug-in to export the JSON? If you text edit the JSON file is there a section for "rigidBodies"?
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Thanks again @Armelline . I did a find and replace on all the XML docs in a copy of the project file and that seemed to do the trick. I won't be working on this file any more just in case. But nice to remove some of the slowness in my Android build for the moment anyway. I'll just have to focus on iOS until they get this worked out. Too bad though- just got Twitter, IAP and GameCircle working well on Android and was contemplating releasing on Android first. Well, we'll see how quickly this gets resolved. Hopefully by the time I am ready to go, they'll have it fixed. Anyway, thanks again!
I suggested this as a work around for load times, but this time with a twist. What if it was on GS's side, where it uses the actor system, and has a "actor" that loads first by itself in an empty scene in order to reduce load time from one scene to another, then once the empty scene is loaded, loads everything else, of course, this would mean that within the scene, there would be lag until everything loads, but you'd have a second actor that is preloaded, called "load screen", covering up the loading of everything, and disappears when everything else is loaded. This would allow people to be able to use custom loading screens graphics.
Although might be moot if the new optimizations reduce load times significantly.
No I'm not! Is there a link to where I can get it?
www.rossmanbrosgames.com
If you trigger the display of a loading screen image before calling the change scene, this can have a similar effect.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
http://help.gamesalad.com/gamesalad-cookbook/7-using-pro-features/custom-collision-shapes-2/ down at the bottom
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@Armelline Thanks! Never thought of that, now I can use all this unused art relating to my game as random loading screens.
@Agent Argyle Did you go into each file manually? You can do that change in less than a minute using Dreamweaver and ctrl+f, select the "folder" option, and just put the appropriate code in the find and replace fields, dreamweaver will search out all instances of that xml code, and replace it. I managed to add a game.attribute into the expression field for the volume of all sound behaviors found through out 200 actors/files in seconds that way.
@Franto No, I did it just as you did. But thanks for the tip - I hadn't considered editing a project that way. In general though, I tend to stay away from sweeping Find & Replace operations since it can be destructive if patterns don't match perfectly. I'd be worried that I'd inadvertently corrupt my project that way. Its fine this once since I just needed it temporarily on a copy of my project to spit out a faster Android build. On the other hand, it would be the only way to edit all the colors or all the fonts at once in GS since those attributes don't take expressions, so again, thanks for the tip!
@adent42 writes on this other thread http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/90162/how-is-the-android-lag-issue-coming-along#latest :
@Agent Argyle Yeah, I know what you mean about it having to match exactly, but as long as the person pays attention to how it is written, it will work.
For example, a very hard thing to convert was % operators to mod functions. Very difficult, as I had to do it in two sections, as it's impossible to do in a single sweep.
Basically the first half of the code was replaced, then I had to carefully pinpoint the other half and replace those. It was due to the x,y of the mod function being the only unique part that I could only change what was "around" the numbers in XML. But doing each half of it made sure to only catch all instances of the % in the expression editor field in the project and nothing else, due to how uniquely written it is as well as making sure all of them within the project were found. My skills are limited though, find and replace along with copy and pasting attributes is all I can do in XML. {For example, if you have a lot of attributes, you can change their order and organize them in XML without it affecting the game.}
Dreamweaver was a huge time saver, otherwise, I would still be using % operators.
Well... unfortunately this method did not work for me. I manually uploaded my .gameproj file by dragging and dropping it onto the portfolio page. A popup asked me which version I wanted to target, so I entered 1.23.1 and then got the page where it asks you whether you'd like to update an existing project or create a new one. I created a new one and copied over all the settings from the original for my API keys and such. I generated a new APK for Android and installed it manually, but it only got to the splash screen before crashing.
Maybe my project uses some new functionality I wasn't aware of, or maybe I did something else wrong, but so far I have not gotten this method to work. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is able to use this method to spit out builds using older versions of the game engine.
thanks!
www.rossmanbrosgames.com
FYI. We're doing some weekend work on profiling / optimizing the engine even further. Can't wait to see how you guys enjoy it next week. I also hear a little bird talking about custom fonts. For Christmas?
And, I was poking around the code for old PGFC. There's some pretty cool stuff in there. Wonder how we might be able to use that? Hmmm. The mind boggles.
Did the little bird tell you if that is integrated in the current system, or a new font rendering system?
What's the PGFC?
@pHghost PGFC is an older project that would take your game project and build a highly optimized binary for them. Can't really use it outright but there are some potentially useful C++ ports of low-level GameSalad Lua code in there. Might be something we can utilize.
That would be an excellent present!
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Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Great news !!
Great news !!
Awesome ,I hope home my dream comes true with this ,scene loading time changes..so that i no need to worry about doing kids apps.Because in my apps while changing scene kids are not looking for loading they are continuously taping.
@CodeWizard said:
What would highly optimized binaries mean in practical terms ?
@NimbleBug wrote:
I noticed the same thing in testing. Though adults also miss the spinning wheel in the corner.
@Agent Argyle that is why i added my own loading image.For adults it is working fine...with kids it is very difficult because they don't think this is another app they want same results as all other apps in terms of loading .
PGFC harkens back to the work the did when trying to build the native code engine, back in 2012, to make games run faster. http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/46265/new-native-code-engine-demo-alpha-state-formerly-pgfc/p1
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Ah! Yes I remember that ! So basically optimised binaries means faster loading more memory efficient games ?
That sounds like it could have a lot of potential to make things run much smoother. Even if only part of what was done gets implemented!
Yes it's essentially the process when your game is converted to machine language better know as compiling.
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I am just hoping that android games will work smoothly with the next update like with the previous GS version. My game is now absolutely unplayable and terribly slow (I do not use any custom collisions). ;-) I know it is under investigation now, just agree with others...
Custom fonts?? Man .. I'm trying to learn C# and move to Unity but you're giving me reasons not to! :P
Custom fonts?!? Love seeing the forward momentum. The pgfc sounds interesting, why was the project stopped in 2012? Hopefully it's not a moonshot that we will never get our hands on.
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