State of GameSalad on 7-10-2013
CodeWizard
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 1,143
Hello! It's that time again... time for another weekly state of GameSalad post. Remember that we were off on Thursday and Friday of last week. As such progress is a bit slower in this report. Remain calm! 
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
We’re still holding off on releasing any new stable builds. More bug fixes and optimizations are in progress in the nightly builds. Head over to the “PRO - Working With GameSalad” forum for more info.
The QA team is digging in on the nightly builds to figure out when they feel comfortable signing off on a stable release. We'll get a plan together this week and have something more useful for you at the next post.
What’s New This Week?
1. We’re continuing to look for some new hires to help cover some weaknesses in our current staffing. Will keep you abreast of the developments on this front. Are you a skilled developer or do you know one? If so, head over to http://www.gamesalad.com/jobs
2. The GameSalad Creator and engine / viewer build process is still being revamped. Looks like that work may be done any day now.
3. More async multiplayer progress has been made this week. Specifically a few more behaviors are completed and we removed / added some additional ones. It looks like we may have a version of async multiplayer suitable for internal testing next week. That means we'll be integrating it into one of our own games and testing the crap out of it before pushing it into nightly builds.
4. We've gotten our build process worked out enough so we can start cooking nightly builds again. I hear it told that a new one will be available as early as tomorrow.
5. We're turning some attention to finalizing Tizen support over the next week or so. Expect more news on this next week!
6. One of our engineers is fixing up issues with how we save & load game projects in Creator. This is to support a major rework of Creator that's been in the works for several months. Once his work is finished we should be able to give a more accurate ETA on when this rework will be available in nightly builds.
7. It turns out that the code that supports tables in Creator and the engine had several nasty warts that needed to be filed down. This was discovered during async multiplayer support work. These issues have been fixed.
8. We're literally days from starting work on our new sprite sheet and draw batching systems. This work is blocked on finalizing the build system fixed referenced in #2. More news soon!
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
We’re still holding off on releasing any new stable builds. More bug fixes and optimizations are in progress in the nightly builds. Head over to the “PRO - Working With GameSalad” forum for more info.
The QA team is digging in on the nightly builds to figure out when they feel comfortable signing off on a stable release. We'll get a plan together this week and have something more useful for you at the next post.
What’s New This Week?
1. We’re continuing to look for some new hires to help cover some weaknesses in our current staffing. Will keep you abreast of the developments on this front. Are you a skilled developer or do you know one? If so, head over to http://www.gamesalad.com/jobs
2. The GameSalad Creator and engine / viewer build process is still being revamped. Looks like that work may be done any day now.
3. More async multiplayer progress has been made this week. Specifically a few more behaviors are completed and we removed / added some additional ones. It looks like we may have a version of async multiplayer suitable for internal testing next week. That means we'll be integrating it into one of our own games and testing the crap out of it before pushing it into nightly builds.
4. We've gotten our build process worked out enough so we can start cooking nightly builds again. I hear it told that a new one will be available as early as tomorrow.
5. We're turning some attention to finalizing Tizen support over the next week or so. Expect more news on this next week!
6. One of our engineers is fixing up issues with how we save & load game projects in Creator. This is to support a major rework of Creator that's been in the works for several months. Once his work is finished we should be able to give a more accurate ETA on when this rework will be available in nightly builds.
7. It turns out that the code that supports tables in Creator and the engine had several nasty warts that needed to be filed down. This was discovered during async multiplayer support work. These issues have been fixed.
8. We're literally days from starting work on our new sprite sheet and draw batching systems. This work is blocked on finalizing the build system fixed referenced in #2. More news soon!
Comments
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Cheers
1. With the reworking of tables, will this fix some of the creators load times on large tables? (right now it's pretty random for me if going from table to any other part of the creator will lag or load instantly)
2. I know the new texture atlasing/sprite sheets are still in the works but is this system intended on being an actual atlas where we reference x,y on a sheet and can mix and match images of varying size or more like a sprite sheet where we have all images fit in a pre-defined box on one sheet ( or is handled on the back end with batching things together automatically)?
Thanks for your continued work.
Couple of questions with regard to sprite sheets.
1. Will this feed into being able to use custom fonts at all? (or will that be added as a seperate feature?)
2. When sprite sheets come, will we still be able to import images separately and use those for animations as we do now? Mainly because:
Cheers!
QS
=DDr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
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I'd imagine if we can control the sheets it will allow for more efficient custom fonts in the sense that we can bake a "font sheet" that contains all letters numbers etc, but this wouldn't be very fun to call on manually. But man that could be a solution!
If gamesalad knew you were loading a font sheet and by default assigned texture spaces to a letter/number so sprite in position 1 is a, 2 is b, 3 is c, etc. Then in display text you have a drop down with font sheets and it converts the text to an image based on that. That would be so cool! One 2048/2048 could contain a whole custom font.
I guess at a minimum we could cram pre-made dialogue boxes into a sheet to make them more efficient.
Or is it still on the back burner?
Cheers
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I did a game jam recently where someone else coded. It felt like such a luxury that we could upload pc, mac and linux versions!
As an aside you really notice the development speed that GS offers when you do a game jam. i.e you see how much people can get done in a couple days using different programming environments. And can compare that to what you can do in GS in the same time frame.
Its been a long time since the last release.
We'll do our best to hide the complexity of sprite sheet management from you. In the general case your usage of Creator will be unchanged and this system will "just work."
In more advanced cases you may want better control over how Creator organizes your sprite sheets to minimize draw calls. I can see a high bar implementation that allows you to choose what sheet contains what images. Definitely not a requirement for initial release though... but it'd be nice to have for sure!
Just curious is there any news on the LUA free engine? Has it been scrapped? Is it on hold? It's been over a year since Alpha LUA free was announced and it would be nice to have any kind of update. Just seems like a lot of work is being done on the current engine when it may be better spent on the LUA free?
Thanks
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I'm confident that CodeWizard has some great tricks up his sleeve to take the creator places we have not expected. It's impressive to see how far it's been coming along since he took the helm.
I hope @CodeWizard can because I'm still not seeing anything close to the kind of quick load responses I was seeing in their LUA free alpha video.
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