Will the Creator be removed once the online tool is ready?
famekrafts
Member, BASIC Posts: 834
I was having a chat with old members here and the scenario is many have left GS community because the GS team isn't that active anymore and they are focusing on online education and thus the developers might get left in the soup.
The plan as they told me is that once the online tool is ready, the creator will be discontinued.
I would suggest keeping the creator even if it is outdated.
It is a very powerful tool compared to engines like Unity with visual scripting right now. Unity is coming up with Visual scritping but it is still far away. This is the reason I chose GS over Unity.
Even outdated and lacking many features it is very powerful and a lot of games can be created with it.
With online creator, we will be forced to work on html5 games which are not graphics intensive. If I have to use retro style low-end graphics, I can use Construct 3 and Stencyl.
With creator I have and I am working on games with very high graphics which can be optimized for iPad Retina Display.
Even if the GS team is lacking and has fewer programmers to work on, keep the creator Alive for Mac and PC.
What is other members opinion here?
Comments
will never be ready.
im sorry to sound rude, but it was in december 2016 (State of GameSalad on 12-1-2016
) when was said that the focus will be on the web creator to be finished before next school year (2017), and the things on native tools will be slow down until that.
so since that december 2016 three years had passed and i don't think any major update or release was made. maybe im wrong
Then the news is everything will stay as it is, maybe it will get outdated but still creator will stay.
not sure how it will affect things, but my view is the desktop creator should stay, regardless of what happens with online resources.
i’ve said elsewhere that gs is a great way to introduce people into the concepts of logic and applying logic to objects. if there’s connectivity or server issues, you’d think an online only resource would be a huge inconvenience.
maybe i’ve misunderstood what’s going on, but if there’s a plan to go to online only, i’m not for it.
yeah, even when is lacking of many things i feel we can create almost anything we can think of, obviously whit its limitations, but its a very intuitive tool that give the option to create a game faster than others. I feel bad about what GS could have been
as you, for now im only hoping to keep what we got, to be able to keep using it.
Im done with hoping for things that will never be implemented, i have 7 years using GS and many things promised 7 years ago never where made, so just keep the technical stuff updated
@famekrafts GS was great. Meaningful GS development ended a few years ago. The creator tool most of the people in this community want has been left behind.
As you invest time and money in software think several years down the road. Will the tool be supported? viable? have community? Then consider how many months you're willing to pay while you learn, master, and actually release a game.
Unity is free (as long as you earn under $100,000 from your game). There are several visual scripting plugins for Unity. The Unity team will release their own version built into the editor later this year. Beyond that there are thousands THOUSANDS! of assets and plugins available on their asset store. There are 2D kits, 3D kits, and every other genre of asset. Dozens of quality demos, tools, art, and code files are free.
If you're willing to jump into scripting Unity uses C# (C Sharp) script and JS (Javascript). It may sound scary but it's very similar to visual scripting and way easier than learning an actual spoken language. Scripting languages are the most fun coding to me. They're less of a 'technical programming' feel and more a 'writing fun game behavior' feel.
I still love GS but I wanted things it couldn't do. I moved onto Unity and found an amazingly easy to learn tool. I'm currently making a game I didn't think was possible with one person. I showed my little brothers and they went crazy over it - 'This looks like Uncharted!'.
I noticed in another thread you're creating an RPG. You may be interested in following the development of Naica. It's being made with Unity.
GS is great for prototyping. GS is functional. GS is also slowly dying.
@RowdyPants seems i can’t both like and agree with your comment.
Would be good to have an update on GameSalad's road-map. Are you going to keep desktop creator as well as online or do you plan to replace it? If so rough timeframe?
I ask this as I'm about to start a new project and want to avoid any potential wasted effort.
I hope, like others have said that the desktop creator will be retained and supported for many years to come but a bit of reassurance would go a long way.
This was the intentions stated long ago. It’s difficult to maintain pc and Mac versions and one online version would be much simpler to maintain. Creator 2 will replace current tools.
Even the last post stated it.
“Creator 2
We're continuing work on getting Creator 2 in shape to replace the existing tools, we're not there yet so we'll still be making updates to Mac and Windows Creator as needed, but progress is being made. I'm hoping we'll have a performance / resource improvement in the next build.”
Actually, I was using Unity 2 weeks back before I came back to GS. Unity is heavily dependant on scripting and also its learning curve is very high compared to GS. Even though the creator tool has to be updated it is still very viable to make games with ease of use.
The same ease of use is not there for Unity or even Unreal.
I have made a game with GS long time back, I can do that again.
Unity is a designer's bottleneck blocker. If you are a coder, yes Unity is the way to go. If you are a designer without a coder in your team it can be frustrating to make even a 2D game.
I am not saying it cannot be done, you are doing it but it's frustrating when every tutorial is also dependent on a lot of scripting.
The whole idea of GS and construct 3 is to not deal with coding and typing hundreds of line, only the logic.
I am keeping one eye at unity as well, because 50% of games today are made in unity but I cannot bank on it, till I get a coder to back me up in my team.
Even with its disadvantages, you can really make 2D games with the current GS creator and even if they do not develop it, just keep it available for download, you will be able to do so, unless you have made good money or built up a team to move up to Unity.
3D and high end games are out of range of GS, accepted and sealed, but you can still do a lot with it, without leaping on to Unity.
There is no roadmap because the staff is not responding. That is the reason I have put up this thread because the last announcement was years ago. So if they have nor discontinued the creator and neither updated it. That means they are not totally giving up on it. Even if they do not have the resources or team to upgrade it, they are still running a business. They are making money through it and no one wishes to end their business.
That is why I have asked people to join my game. If we succeed through game or book, we might bring game salad into the limelight giving hopes to its creators that it can be revived. They might hire more people.
Also, it is common sense to not keep alll eggs in one basket. Keep a tab on Unity. If you want to make big games, you might need to switch to that boat.
Toque
What was the date of this announcement?
Does anyone remember that time they were building Graphine SDK?
I looks like GS dev kinda stopped with CodeWizard leaving
New game!: [Snake Rage]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snake-rage/id1463859909
@famekrafts
i buy playmaker for visual scripting on unity and started learning it, but i always come to gamesalad when i have an idea and i know i can make it in gamesalad 10x faster than it would take me in unity.
unity is including their own visual scripting on this year update to compete with UE blueprints, so we should keep an eye on it.
but as i said, i wish to stay on gs and dont leave, i hope to get a big picture of what gamesalad future is, but for the last couple of years the only updates we hear are; we are patching this, fixing this and nothing else because educational stuff is more important, but even that i dont see any progress on that neither.
so i will continue on gamesalad as long as i can update my old games, then if the support stops, i will have to look to redo them on other engine.
Unity Visual Scripting I am not that hopeful after reading this.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity3d-getting-visual-scripting-in-2019-2.577084/
I am not sure why GS is being neglected. Maybe they couldn't make a business model out of it.
I also do not want to leave GS. Even with its limitation, it is very powerful for non-coders, especially for retina ipad and android phones
We need some active discussions with the GS staff here.
They are doin some work, so i'm hopefull!
https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/97298/q2-2019-spring-has-sprung-and-summer-is-coming#latest
New game!: [Snake Rage]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snake-rage/id1463859909
That is what concerns me. Because they will disband the creator, so should I work in the online creator for my book or use the windows creator?
I have just tried online creator. It feels it will take three times more work to make something in it and because it is online, that's another problem. What happens when the net is not working?
Other games editors like construct 3 work offline. What about GS?
This was quoted from April 28.
But I think it was first communicated fall 2017. But I can’t remember.
It makes practical sense if you don’t want to maintain Apple and windows. I preferred creator.
@famekrafts I would love to see GS rebound but I find it unlikely.
I'm happy to help with coding. Unity has a collaborate feature. I understand if you'd rather finish the project and book in GS. If you're interested private message me your email.
I've setup this Shared Folder we can use to store project documents. I'll grant your email address access to edit it. I will then ask you to fill out this Game Design Document to the best of your ability. Be brief and clear.
If the project requirements are within my skill set we can move ahead. That might mean I build you a template and you can design on top of it.
The next step is storyboarding. This Tool is helpful for that.
Sorry if I'm not addressing everything, I read the first few post on the thread and I though I'd give an update:
re: Existing Creator
Those tools are going to go away someday, but not soon. We are still working on optimizations of the HTML5 tool and until I feel satisfied that the tool is a good replacement for the native tools, the native tools are sticking around.
We WILL be replacing them eventually, because maintaining 3 different tools is untenable and it seems (as of late) that even minor updates to macOS will break things in our tool. I just don't want our team to deal with that anymore in the long term.
re: HTML5 Tool
So the HTML5 engine is lacking parity, which is one of the big barriers to full HTML5 based tool adoption.
Even with that said, the idea would be to have the HTML5 based tool wrapped inside a native package with the ability to launch the native engine for preview (as well as run send games to the viewer). So when the HTML5 tool is "ready" you should not lose any functionality compared to the native tools.
Here is the minimum that needs to happen before the full switchover:
I need to get back to some other problems, so I will be back later today to read the rest of this threads and any questions that might arise from this post.
Cheers!
@adent42 Thanks adent that sorts it out. I believe for the book I have to work both with the creator and web tool, as it seems the web tool is not ready yet.
@RowdyPants
I am going to finish this game in GS. A game without coding is always in demand, especially when I am converting it into a book.
Keep the options open for unity though. You are working on a game, complete it. Till then I am working on mine and in the meantime, we can cook up some plan for the game in Unity.
@famekrafts Alright brother. Sounds good!
@adent42 As for feature parity: Please don't forget The shift pitch functionality for the HTML5 tool
Many of us have hundreds of actors with sounds carefully mixed and pitch shifted.
We can not lose this functionality !
Hi @adent42 - I've been nipping in here occasionally, to see what's up and how things are going, and ironically, started visiting more frequently recently, hence saw this almost immediately! - my comment/concern was from a while ago, but I appreciate you clarifying that the native engine will remain, and it won't be a wholesale jump to HTML5 only.
I thought I recalled however, that regarding the educational tool being fully updated, there was a final vision that GS was destined for classroom educational/'testing game ideas out' use only, with publishing no longer an important factor? (or even unsupported?)
ie. the impression I got was that the tool was moving completely towards education, and moving away from being a commercial games publishing solution (ie. that bit in Brent's Linked-in page that kinda claimed that the change from a commercial game development tool company, to an educational one, had already successfully happened, a couple of years ago?)
I'm happier if I'm wrong, tbh, and things like Google's latest dictation that I have to rebuild Courier Chaos as a 64-bit app, mean that I'll probably need to dip my toes into GS from time to time just to maintain these, although I regularly get unsettled by the still far too frequent incidents of publishing being down, ads, bugs, etc failures (hence I'm keeping an eye on a potential 'good/stable' window to occur, for quickly rebuilding my apps, if need be)...
Cheers again...
Don't remind me! - yep, I remember that that little pet project meant pretty much everything stopped as regards GS being maintained, until it quietly died a death....
@adent42 does as much as he can, but he's kind of spread between Creator '2', and the desktop versions I guess...
@Japster sort of.
We have been focusing more and more of our time on education, but one of our edu selling points is that we make a pro quality tool.
So publishing and the native engine is always going to be a thing (at least while I'm still around).
The main difference I see is that over time everything is going to be done through this tool (i.e. publishing will no longer be a separate site, but embedded in the tool). The idea is to make everything even easier to use and more integrated. That's good for edu and developers.
Ahh... I see... Thanks for the clarification and confirmation @adent42 - Well, here's hoping...
Just waiting on that 64-bit publishing work now...
Cheers...
Glad to see the desktop creator is still supported. The WWDC presentation today showed a lot of OS changes coming down the line. I know it's way too early to expect any signs of support, but I hope iOS 13, and iPadOS, and MacOS10.16 are on the radar. Fall isn't that far from now.
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