State of GameSalad on 6/30/2015...

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  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    it needs to be rasterized as part of it's rendering process ?

    Yep, basically drawing a bitmap to memory on the fly, before rendering it to the frame.

  • JSprojectJSproject Member Posts: 730

    @Armelline said:
    People complaining about fuzzy fonts always confuses me. I've used the built-in fonts extensively in games in the past and tested on iPhone 4, 5, 6, 6+ and iPad and everything looked great in each case. I guess it comes down to how you make use of them.

    Exactly my experience also and I test on both iPhones, iPod touches and iPads and both non-retina and retina devices.
    I

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,327

    @JSproject said:
    Exactly my experience also and I test on both iPhones, iPod touches and iPads and both non-retina and retina devices.

    Add to that the performance dip from using them shouldn't be that high. If you're displaying enough text for it to affect performance in a meaningful way, you're likely either displaying too much text and confusing the scene, or on a scene where not that much is going on as the user is too busy reading text, and performance isn't that big an issue.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @Hopscotch said:
    Yep, basically drawing a bitmap to memory on the fly, before rendering it to the frame.

    Yeah, I re-read your post and realised that you'd actually already factored in rasterization with your "create a new image" comment. That make a lot of sense as to why (in some situations where processor cycles are already being jumped on by a lot of demands) the Display Text behaviour can kill performance - while you still might be able to squeeze in a few more image displays without killing the frame rate.

    But like all these issues - it will be specific to how your project is constructed - and like everything else test it to death !

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782
    edited July 2015

    @Socks said:
    But like all these issues...

    @Armelline said:
    People complaining about fuzzy fonts always confuses me.

    We can always just lower our standards. :D

    Here a screenshot from a live and current 13 billion dollar project.

    Notice the creative use of color and font variation for subtle emphasis.

    Courtesy: http://www.lhc-facts.ch/

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822
    edited July 2015

    Yeah, but one of the goals of the LHC is to collide known fonts together at speeds just under c in the hope of discovering new typefaces.

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    Yeah, but one of the goals of the LHC is to collide known fonts together at speeds just under c in the hope of discovering new typefaces.

    I see where you are going with this. GS could randomly fill memory with dots, run a OCR function to identify successes, and presto, unlimited fonts.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822
  • JSprojectJSproject Member Posts: 730
    edited July 2015

    @Socks has found the sparticle!

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @Hopscotch said:
    I see where you are going with this. GS could randomly fill memory with dots, run a OCR function to identify successes, and presto, unlimited fonts.

    That is exactly what I was thinking, all that is needed is a few thousand randomly generated free roaming pixels under the influence of pedesis (Brownian motion) and - if Heisenberg was correct - they will, in time, coalesce into viable fonts, this is how Cooper Black and Comic Sans were discovered in the early 1920s.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822
    edited July 2015

    @Hopscotch

    One obvious (or maybe less obvious) side to custom fonts, if they are implemented - and implemented as vector based fonts (which is not certain) - is that this would effectively allow vector graphics into GameSalad given that you can, with various software, design your own fonts, so you draw up some game elements in something like Illustrator (or any vector drawing software), move these designs to your font generation software and then these are passed to GS as fonts, meaning you can scale them to your hearts desire . . . . but of course this comes with all the above caveats (less efficient than bitmapped images, performance hit in certain situations and so on).

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    That is exactly what I was thinking,...

    Damn, hope GS doesn't read this and change company direction again. :#

    Actually ... , you wouldn't need to wait for the dots to coalesce into fonts, the innate human ability to find patterns will do the job. Result - a super fast, user specific, display text behaviour.

    By the way, I notice that your image seems to spell out the current location of Nibiru.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @JSproject said:
    Socks has found the sparticle!

    I am going to guess you have children ! :smile:

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @Hopscotch said:
    Damn, hope GS doesn't read this and change company direction again. :#

    Apparently Codewizared is building a SHC in his bathroom, or at least that's what he said he was doing when his neighbours complained about the smell/noise.

    @Hopscotch said:
    Actually ... , you wouldn't need to wait for the dots to coalesce into fonts, the innate human ability to find patterns will do the job.

    Intriguing an apophenia based font system, this is cutting edge stuff, I hope you are patenting this stuff as you post.

    @Hopscotch said:
    By the way, I notice that your image seems to spell out the current location of Nibiru.

    Yes, I saw that too, and if anyone doesn't agree then they are working for 'them'.

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    Hopscotch

    One obvious (or maybe less obvious) side to custom fonts, if they are implemented - and implemented as vector based fonts (which is not certain) - is that this would effectively allow vector graphics into GameSalad given that you can, with various software, design your own fonts, so you draw up some game elements in something like Illustrator (or any vector drawing software), move these designs to your font generation software and then these are passed to GS as fonts, meaning you can scale them to your hearts desire . . . . but of course this comes with all the above caveats (less efficient than bitmapped images, performance hit in certain situations and so on).

    Curiously, GS Creator used to be able to read eps files did it not? At least .psd. So the tech to convert these existed?

    Given the option, the possibilities would be awesome.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822
    edited July 2015

    @Hopscotch said:
    Curiously, GS Creator used to be able to read eps files did it not? At least .psd. So the tech to convert these existed?

    GS can still ingest .psd files, but only the bitmap (no paths or other stuff) - is this what you meant ?

    @Hopscotch said:
    Given the option, the possibilities would be awesome.

    Yeah, you just need to play around with a bunch of the Unicode stuff to see the possibilities . . .

    Games without artwork would probably load pretty quick . . . here is a unicode ball running in GS, so no imported images, works exactly the same on your iPad/iPhone - scalable, fast loading.

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    but only the bitmap (no paths or other stuff)

    Ah ok, too bad. A cursory test on my behalf would have shown this.

    I am now curious to what extent the new rendering engine opens the doors for deformable bitmaps, vector based rendering and shaders, i.e. making use of the modern GPU features.

    But I want layer based depth sorting first! :)

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822
    edited July 2015

    @Hopscotch said:
    I am now curious to what extent the new rendering engine opens the doors for deformable bitmaps, vector based rendering and shaders, i.e. making use of the modern GPU features.

    From what I understand it won't really involve any of that, it's main features are sprite sheets (mega-textures), clever memory shuffling trickery and an efficient tiling system, I hope Toyman got to implement the stuff he was talking about, before he 'slipped' out the window, as it was sounding very impressive - this is not to say modern GPU features are not utilised (Toyman spoke at length about how GS was exploiting every last drop of power from a device's GPU, and on a platform by platform basis), just that none of it involved (from what I understand) any vector stuff or deformations or anything outside of old fashioned 'make-everything-faster' raw power.

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    ...it's main features are sprite sheets (mega-textures), clever memory shuffling trickery and an efficient tiling system...

    True, added to this however, the 64px sprited bitmaps are mapped onto triangles, triangles which make up your actor. I.e. a tessellated actor which could be deformed with a little math.

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @Hopscotch said:
    True, added to this however, the 64px sprited bitmaps are mapped onto triangles, triangles which make up your actor. I.e. a tessellated actor which could be deformed with a little math.

    I don't think the user has access to these triangles in any meaningful way (?) we can control how the mega-texture processes our images on a square 64²px basis, the one thing I hope Toyman got to implement was flipping and rotating within the image database search process, so it processes not only identical tiles but flipped and rotated tiles too, there are many situations where you'd have flipped and rotated tiles.

  • HopscotchHopscotch Member, PRO Posts: 2,782

    @Socks said:
    I don't think the user has access to these triangles in any meaningful way (?)

    No we don't, that is why I said maybe "opens the doors for".

    Having a cool 2DTransform behavior, bending an actor by degrees, in either the X or Y plane, given an offset point... swooon!

  • Thunder_ChildThunder_Child Member Posts: 2,343

    There is NO Planet X....I repeat NO Planet X even if there was one I doubt it would be found in a font...it would be found in a pixel perfect rendition of our solar system if Pi was converted into a bitmap....

  • PhilipCCPhilipCC Encounter Bay, South AustraliaMember Posts: 1,390

    @Socks said:
    That is exactly what I was thinking, all that is needed is a few thousand randomly generated free roaming pixels under the influence of pedesis (Brownian motion)...

    Can you make the yellow dot divide with binary multiplication, and turn into an egg, or a chicken... whichever you think comes first? :D

  • PestoPesto Member Posts: 38

    I have tried to read thru most of this post but there's a lot :(
    I think I have my head wrapped around the pricing schedule. For instance, I pay $20/month to use but when I want to publish I can just pay the $30 for the month or two to publish, and then go back to to $20/month. Right?
    Ok, so what happens if, say, one month I don't pay the $20? Does GS become unusable on my MAC? I can't even play around with some ideas in the software?

    In thinking about this monthly payment plan schedule, I think many companies have watched Adobe and saw they were successful (so far) so why not copy. I can answer that simply, because most companies are not Adobe. In other words, Adobe has a stranglehold on the industry and therefore will be ok with subscription a while longer. I say "a while longer" because some companies are coming out with products nearly as good (i.e. Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo). This is not the same however with Game Engines. There are plenty that you can still buy (GM, Fusion 2.5, etc...). Yes they are windows and GS is Mac but soon Fusion will run on MAC (end of summer), or you can install Windows virtually or thru Bootcamp. So GS does not have a stranglehold on the market and never will. Saying all this, I do like GS a lot but not that fond of pricing schedule.

  • jonmulcahyjonmulcahy Member, Sous Chef Posts: 10,408

    @Pesto said:
    I have tried to read thru most of this post but there's a lot :(
    I think I have my head wrapped around the pricing schedule. For instance, I pay $20/month to use but when I want to publish I can just pay the $30 for the month or two to publish, and then go back to to $20/month. Right?
    Ok, so what happens if, say, one month I don't pay the $20? Does GS become unusable on my MAC? I can't even play around with some ideas in the software?

    In thinking about this monthly payment plan schedule, I think many companies have watched Adobe and saw they were successful (so far) so why not copy. I can answer that simply, because most companies are not Adobe. In other words, Adobe has a stranglehold on the industry and therefore will be ok with subscription a while longer. I say "a while longer" because some companies are coming out with products nearly as good (i.e. Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo). This is not the same however with Game Engines. There are plenty that you can still buy (GM, Fusion 2.5, etc...). Yes they are windows and GS is Mac but soon Fusion will run on MAC (end of summer), or you can install Windows virtually or thru Bootcamp. So GS does not have a stranglehold on the market and never will. Saying all this, I do like GS a lot but not that fond of pricing schedule.

    right, you pay $20 a month to use the software, when you are ready to publish you pay the $30 for the month (which is prorated I believe, so if you've already paid the 20, you just pay 10 more). Then drop back down to the $20 when you're not publishing.

    if you don't pay for the month, you can't use it, but that's not a big deal, just sign back up and start using it again :)

  • jonmulcahyjonmulcahy Member, Sous Chef Posts: 10,408

    @CodeWizard
    Do you think somewhere down the road you could have an offline publishing mode for pro users? I'm doing 20-30 builds a day these days working on cross platform build and it's a real drag sometimes waiting for the upload/generate/download process to complete.

  • Thunder_ChildThunder_Child Member Posts: 2,343

    I was under the impression we didn't have to login anymore. Now...not only do I have to login...it doesn't remember my username and password like it used to and I have to type it in each time.

  • GeorgeGSGeorgeGS Member, PRO Posts: 478

    @Thunder_Child said:
    I was under the impression we didn't have to login anymore. Now...not only do I have to login...it doesn't remember my username and password like it used to and I have to type it in each time.

    You do need to login to validate your account. Creator will try to login each time you use it, and if it can't connect but have valid saved credentials from a previous login you'll be put in offline mode for that session. If you have the "remember me" box checked it should save the credentials and not ask you each time you run it.

    If you're still having trouble it would help to know the platform/version you're using.

  • CobraBladeCobraBlade Member Posts: 97

    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.

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