State of the Salad 03/2018

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  • Twayne2Twayne2 Member Posts: 458
    edited June 2018

    So what currently is the best option for releasing to andriod/IOS? The latest GS version or an older one?

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @AlchimiaStudios GameSalad is built on OpenGL.

    From what little I've read it shouldn't be too much work porting, but there are also a few compatibility layers that would make work easier (and help keep the code between the android and ios versions consistent).

  • AlchimiaStudiosAlchimiaStudios Member Posts: 1,069

    @adent42 said:
    @AlchimiaStudios GameSalad is built on OpenGL.

    From what little I've read it shouldn't be too much work porting, but there are also a few compatibility layers that would make work easier (and help keep the code between the android and ios versions consistent).

    Thanks for the insight. Good to hear.

    Follow us: Twitter - Website

  • squirrel42squirrel42 Member, PRO Posts: 195

    Where can I find the latest RC please?

  • velaitvelait Member Posts: 2

    Can I create apk file in beta version?

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672

    @AlchimiaStudios said:

    @adent42 said:
    @AlchimiaStudios GameSalad is built on OpenGL.

    From what little I've read it shouldn't be too much work porting, but there are also a few compatibility layers that would make work easier (and help keep the code between the android and ios versions consistent).

    Thanks for the insight. Good to hear.

    The only thing I'm concerned about is, will there be a performance hit / wrapper etc, compared to current (fast) renderer?

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034
    edited June 2018

    @Japster likely, no, or not much.

    In absolute terms there will be less performance that without a wrapper, but the idea is that the wrappers just use the same or less overhead than OpenGL itself did as compared to using Metal or Vulkan.

    I haven't done any digging myself, but one of the wrappers I'm looking at claims that the wrapper + metal is still faster the OpenGL.

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672

    @adent42 said:
    @Japster likely, no, or not much.

    In absolute terms there will be less performance that without a wrapper, but the idea is that the wrappers just use the same or less overhead the OpenGL itself did as compared to using Metal or Vulkan.

    I haven't done any digging myself, but one of the wrappers I'm looking at claims that the wrapper + metal is still faster the OpenGL.

    Sounds promising @adent42 , and many thanks for the fast reply and reassuring info - In other news, I finally managed to release my game thanks to your hard work, so many thanks for that!.... :smile:

    Now we wait.... ...for the dozen or downloads I normally get over a year - bloody App Store.... :wink:

  • CasualEvolutionCasualEvolution Member, PRO Posts: 521

    Hi @loganjan22 the ads are working for me, I'm using chartboost. I did nothing special but create the variable privateDataConsentForAds as it was said before in this post.
    The only problem that I have is that in the first request the ADs no show.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @loganjan22 it depends on the network.

    For admob, it should show non-targeted ads.
    Chartboost ad calls are made, but they have stated they will not be serving ads if private data consent is not given.
    Tapdaq I was not able to test, but I believe it's the same for them.
    Revmob will not show ads, we are disabling it manually since they did not update their SDK to let us pass that information on.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @loganjan22 that was one of the "surprises" I had in the code for this round. Not yet, but once we update the publishing UI you will be able to. I'm gonna concentrate on getting this build in a full release state first though. Then after that, we'll update publishing to support both types of ads.

  • Game On InteractiveGame On Interactive Member Posts: 37

    Ok so don't kill me for being lazy and not reading back but I have had a very long week. What must ALL I do exactly for my Chartboost Int ADs to start showing again? Currently none of them show for me at all.

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672

    I may have been a bit eager to release, as I'm now finding that occasionally I'm getting an ad, but lots of times in between (10-15), even after waiting 3-5 mins, I don't get anything - just the failed ad error...

    I've tried Chartboost, and Revmob. Had to turn off Revmob, as even though I was asking for video rewarded ads, it was serving static interstitials or animations, which then didn't flag up as rewarded once clicked past - that will pee my users off massively! :frowning:

    oh, and Banner ads no longer showing... Although I deselected none-kid-friendly ad categories, which might be relevant....

  • DigiChainDigiChain Member, PRO Posts: 1,277

    @Japster - That's concerning to hear. Are you using standard interstitials too, or just reward videos? - and if so do interstitials work?

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672
    edited June 2018

    @DigiChain said:
    @Japster - That's concerning to hear. Are you using standard interstitials too, or just reward videos? - and if so do interstitials work?

    I'm just trying to use Reward Videos mate (and banners) - more concerned that RevMob (which never showed these static ones before, despite being enabled in the RevMob console), is now showing them when GS apparently requests Reward Videos?.... ...and of course, NOT returning a success code to GS (or on GS's side) for rewarding users for viewing them....

    I will re-apply Test Mode for both Chartboost and RevMob, and see if the same build then shows ads okay... if I got NOTHING back, I'd assume my ad-based config in RevMob and Chartboost are wrong, but I'm getting some ads occasionally, just very rarely, and sometimes the wrong type - Static, etc...

    Aaarrrgh!

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @Game On Interactive add an integer game attribute "privateDataConsentForAds"

    If you're using admob and don't care about personalized ads, set it to 0. If you want to show personalized ads and/or are using any other ad network, you will need to follow the link to the GDPR thread to learn more.

    If you're showing now ads, you will still want to republish your games to remove GameSalad's google analytics tracking.

    @Japster if you can't figure it out, can you PM me the publishing link to your game and I can look at the debug logs to see what's happening.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    Just to keep things together, please move GDPR related discussion back to that thread. I'm about to put an update there.

  • ZwireZwire Member, PRO Posts: 179

    @Japster said:
    I may have been a bit eager to release, as I'm now finding that occasionally I'm getting an ad, but lots of times in between (10-15), even after waiting 3-5 mins, I don't get anything - just the failed ad error...

    I've tried Chartboost, and Revmob. Had to turn off Revmob, as even though I was asking for video rewarded ads, it was serving static interstitials or animations, which then didn't flag up as rewarded once clicked past - that will pee my users off massively! :frowning:

    oh, and Banner ads no longer showing... Although I deselected none-kid-friendly ad categories, which might be relevant....

    I also have the problem for a while now that occasionally my rewarded ads show interstitials and my interstitials show rewarded ads. Said this a long time ago to @ForumNinja but apparantly nothing was fixed.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @Zwire take a look at the newer build and see if it's better. As for what ads are served, I'm not sure what's up. We're running the correct code for showing a particular ad, so the only thing I can thing going wrong is that we're either getting the wrong value for what ad to show from the engine, timing is off so it's showing ads from a previous request, or the network is sending the wrong ads in an attempt to backfill.

    Try the newest build (since it's using the latest SDK, hopefully it will fix any bugs that are the fault of the ad network).

    Also, can you let me know what network you're using? Some networks we use the same placement tag for both types of ads and it may be better to use separate tags to eliminate another potential source of error.

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672
    edited June 2018

    Thanks @adent42 - really appreciated - trying a couple more things tonight, including trying to move over to Admob mediation, but worryingly, I also had a couple of Chartboost reward videos (as have my testers/players) where it's watched fully, X pressed at the end, and NO reward given... Deffo not showing Banner ads from RevMob now though, but again, might be down to my filters for NO sexuality/religion/gambling ads being applied...

    On Android, RevMob tries to play a video, gets a few seconds in, then says "Can't Play This Video. " every single time, then rewards the user anyway, so the GS flag must be being set wrong, either by Revmob's return code being incorrect, or a GS bug?

    Appreciate the offer of running through the logs, might well take you up on it, as my app is now out, and users are mentioning not being rewarded! :frowning: I deffo need a fix asap! :frowning:

  • ZwireZwire Member, PRO Posts: 179

    @adent42 Im using Chartboost for rewarded and interstitial ads. Ill try the new build amd see if its better.

    @Japster I also sometimes didnt receive my reward after fully watching the reward video for a few months or so.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    FYI I'm looking at the console logs for a few apps and the logs say that ad's aren't available from Chartboost. It may be a fill rate issue, but I'm not sure. I'm writing to Chartboost now to find out more. I did test the RC build yesterday and was consistently able to get ads.

  • JapsterJapster Member Posts: 672
    edited June 2018

    Thanks @adent42, any help greatly appreciated - I can consistently move between the old app and new, getting ads on the old, and none on the new RC build - It may possibly be down to me, but I honestly doubt it - I just have a simple Reward Ad behaviour, followed by checking the Reward flags... :frowning:

  • ForumNinjaForumNinja Key Master, Head Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 554

    @loganjan22 said:
    The consumable purchases seem to not be working. I tried the consumable behavior and the non consumable purchase request in TestFlight and only the non consumable works. Just letting you know.

    I just tried both types of IAP's for iOS and they appear to be working fine (using the RC build option in publishing).

    @Japster said:
    Thanks @adent42, any help greatly appreciated - I can consistently move between the old app and new, getting ads on the old, and none on the new RC build

    I'm not seeing Chartboost ads either with the new build. It sounds like @adent42 may have found the issue though so hopefully we'll have a fix ready later today.

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    Did I mention I hate pointers? Okay. So I think we found the Chartboost problem with the RC (actually it's with all ad networks).

    FYI: The "current build" will work better than the RC but not as good as the old current build. And that's because of various delays around figuring out the consent value.

    In the RC build, I passed the consent value from the lua engine to the iOS wrapper. I though I was passing and int around but it was actually passing a pointer to an int. So the ad network code kept seeing ridiculous consent values like 2434234928374892, which is definitely not 1.

    And all this is possible because pointers are to a C-like language, basically long ints. Which means my compiler never threw and error. By some miracle, my initial testing worked, so I didn't look closely.

    When I told everyone "Chartboost is just telling us it doesn't have ads", it was because I was setting the privacy feature so that it wouldn't send ads!

    Also why, if I tested with admob, everything looked fine!

    Anyway, making a new iOS build for RC now, you should see it shortly.

  • CasualEvolutionCasualEvolution Member, PRO Posts: 521

    Hi @adent42 I'm lost, with what button should I generate? with "Build RC" or with "Generate App"?
    I was using Chartboost and it stopped working, I was going to try AdMob to see if I had better luck

  • adent42adent42 Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,034

    @CasualEvolution I just put out a fix for Build RC. Try that one. That one should deliver Chartboost ads more effectively and fix a potential crash issue.

  • CasualEvolutionCasualEvolution Member, PRO Posts: 521
    edited June 2018

    Ok @adent42 thanks!, I'm going to try and tell you (between both test AdMob and I had no luck either :( )

  • CasualEvolutionCasualEvolution Member, PRO Posts: 521

    @adent42 Chartboost is working now :)

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