State of the Salad - GameSalad 3.0 - September Edition
adent42
Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,360
Just cause the original GameSalad 3.0 thread is getting long in the tooth here's what's new:
- Android API 36 and Google Play Billing 8 is on the RC channel.
Engine 2 App Gen is almost done. Some cool stuff:
- Real compiling / linking. This means that iOS will work like Android and only include the ad network libraries that you ask for, meaning smaller binaries!
- New single file package format. The game and assets are stored in a compressed archive . We use a very fast to compression algorithm, so it has minimal effect on loading time. In fact combine with an updated version of the image processing we did you now get faster loading images with similar size to pngs. Bonus, the format is proprietary, which means it's got some light DRM for your games!
- Running on an on-demand batch server with newer build tools, so no more risk of waiting for us to kick the icon server or waiting for us to delete old temp files if we run out of space.
- Windows.
- With untested steam support.
Creator 2
- Creator 2 is now default. The home page now takes you to Creator 2 instead of download. Download link is still there
- Folders: You now have folders for assets, actors, and attributes. No folders for Scenes since order matters there. Sorry about it taking so long!
- Attribute Reordering: You can now re-order custom attributes!
- Engine 2 Preview: You can test your game on Engine 2 while we work on getting it out to you! It's running the html5 version of the new engine, but it's actually going to be pretty close to the native engine 2 because of how it's built. We built the new engine on Haxe a language the compiles to a whole bunch of stuff. In our case HTML5 and C++. But from the same code so except for some bits on how some assets load, it's using the exact same engine logic!
- Image Background Removal: In addition to image Trim and Resize, we now have image background removal! It's an AI based method that runs on GPU, so if you have an older system and a big image, it might take a bit.
Snapshots & Apps (Replacing "Publishing")
- Instead of a Game with Service Configs and Apps it will now be Snapshots and Apps. Apps will be generated form Snapshots and all Service Configuration and things like the Icon will be inside the App.
- I'm still thinking through the UI so this likely won't come out until after Engine 2 App Gen.
- This will be integrated inside creator-html5. Legacy creator will deep link into creator 2 on publish.
- We're in the process of porting the legacy engine build to the new build workers, once that's done we'll start opening Engine 2 appgen to all
Cheers!
Comments
Loving the updates!! Folders are great, medium to larger projects will benefit immensely!
I am trying to update my game but when using the build RC I get an error saying make sure my icon and launch image are PNG's which they are. they are the same ones I've used for years. It said to reference this error code [9338b232-02b0-4aaf-9f14-46bc198ed68d]
Nevermind, whatever the issue was, corrected itself. If i run into any troubles uploading to either store I will report back. Also the above post confused me. When you say Engine 2 and Creator 2 are you referring to the web creator? are there any changes coming to the gamesalad desktop creator? I know there are some differences between the two so I'm also curious if you plan to drop support for one or if you plan to make them identical. I know of at least one feature available on the web creator that is not supported on the desktop creator that I would love to use.
Another issue I have run into. I attempted to update my iOS app and transporter gave me an error message saying the minimum supported ios key for 12.2 was invalid. So i thought changing it to the next available option would fix it but when i tried to change the minimum to 13 it would not update on the screen nor would it be applied to the build. I tried and again it wasnt accepted by transporter. I never attempted to change the min so Im wondering if it ever worked? But also I found a reddit post that mentions come 2027 the min that apple will allow ios apps to target is 15. So if this option never worked and was just a placeholder then it will have to be updated and changed so that we can actually select what our min ios version should be and might as well get a jump on the new requirements by making the lowest option ios 15.
I just PM'd @adent42 but I see @NoobDev actually raised the issue here first. Should have read this thread first!
@NoobDev or anyone else needing to upload on a time-crunch — I just manually edited the minimum version and was able to upload it to Apple fine. So if you need to do any testing before @adent42 can get it fixed, it's still possible. I'm not sure I'd necessarily trust it for actual release though as there might well be frameworks or stuff that Apple will take issue with on actual store submission. To get it uploaded to TestFlight, though:
Here's a largely untested script that does it for you. Unzip and just double click it to run. It'll output to the same folder as the input.
Thanks for this @Armelline. I luckily found that work around after posting that by doing a few googles. From what I read, changing the min to a later version wont disrupt anything with apple so I submitted it and it passed transporter and hit testflight but apple hasn't reviewed it for distribution yet because they are so slow but if it gets denied I will update this thread.
Upon further testing the script needs updating as it doesn't work as intended so do not bother downloading it. I'll look at it again tomorrow.
Backend fixed, should default to min 13.0
It’s interesting to see the updates and discussion around GameSalad 3.0. The progress and new features mentioned here give developers a good idea of how the platform was evolving at the time.