Salad News - 2023-08-16

adent42

Hello Everybody,

Way back when, I used to do monthly updates on what we were up at the salad. The school year is starting all over the US and we're onboarding classrooms full of students ready to build games with GameSalad.

As this happens, we're also working on tweaks to our back-end systems to make up for a lot of old tech debt that's been holding us back. So here's what we've been up to!

Arcade 3

If you haven't noticed we've launched an updated arcade! We've updated the UI a bit and added orientation detection on mobile, so we can warn users to rotate their devices.

https://arcade.gamesalad.com/

As part of this effort, we're going through more recent entries to update our "featured games" on arcade.

Future plans include:

• move away from static arcade embeds to more dynamic ones, so we can add more features
• doing some static game analysis so we can divide the arcade into mobile friendly games and desktop friendly games, so you'll never see a listing for a game you can't play,
• the ability to map and autoload joystick support, letting us show off more games at conferences with our GameSalad Arcade Cabinet.
• find an arcade ad partner so we can integrate ads into games automatically and decide on thresholds where we start sharing revenue with creators (think youtube).
• integrate the new arcade into GameSalad viewer, so the app becomes both a dev and play tool!
• let creators mark their games "remixable", so other users can use an arcade game as a starting place for their own creations

There's a lot of stuff before we can do this stuff, but we just wanted you to know that we do occasionally think about arcade and want to turn it into something special.

DB Move

First off, we're moving some of our databases to new servers that should help us scale better in the future, operate more cost effectively. If you've experienced some outages over the last month or so, we were likely tweaking things in prep for this move. We just finished the move last night and are keeping an eye on things.

Content

For our education market, we're building out some new content targeted at teachers, but I though this audience might find one of the items interesting:

https://gamesalad.com/education/cs-concepts-in-gamesalad/

The coolest idea from this doc that we created while building a few internal games is the concept of a "Command Object" Actor. Let us know in the thread if you want a video or for me to cover it in more detail!

Publishing 2

We're in the process of moving the publishing UI (https://publishing.gamesalad.com/) into Creator 2.

The impetus for the move is to get rid of another legacy server, saving us both time (in the time it takes to add new features) and money (in server cost).

But the biggest reason is to unify the developer experience, making Creator 2 a one stop shop for building and managing your games.

This will also give us a chance to adjust some things to make generating apps more intuitive:

• The ability to upload icons per app
• Service config in the app context and not the game context,
• Support for adaptive icons on android and custom splash screens on FireTV.

Android Ad Network updates

We're also in the process of testing our updates to the Android build, sometime this week or next you should see a new RC for Android with the following updates:

• Target Android 33
• Updated ad networks: IronSrc 7.3.1.1, Admob 22.2.0, Chartboost 9.3.1
• Google Billing Client 6
• Google Consent Management Platform support for GDRP compliance (https://support.google.com/admob/answer/13554116?hl=en)

Shortly after the Android update, we'll be doing the same for iOS

As we wrap up some of these "tech debt" task, it means we'll be able to move faster on features, so we're excited!

Community Spotlight Submission

Hey, we're love to shed some more spotlight on the community, so if you have a new game coming out or if you want GameSalad to share your story and help market you or your studio, DM me!

Keep Creating!

Armelline

A dictionary of dictionaries (row labels pointing to columns with each column having labels pointing to values).

I have definitely neglected using the labels in tables over the years. I never really bothered to explore what's possible with them. An example of this would be great!

adent42

Sadly it's not as easy as table["blah"]["blah"], but the general idea is:

tableCellValue(tables.Countries,tableRowNumber(tables.Countries,"US"),tableColNumber(tables.Countries,"de"))

This was for a project where we had internationalized labels. With this you could look up the row US and then get the name of the US in German. The equivalent in a "normal" language would be:

tables.Countries["US"]["de"]

adent42

Though once I get past a bunch of this other tech debts stuff, it would be nice to add a step in Creator2's parser to transpile the hash/map lookup style to the tableCellValue function.

Armelline

When I next have some free time I have an experiment with what is possible!

AHBGames

Hi @adent42 the android 33 target is not ready yet? This message appeared in several of my apps "The app must be targeting Android 13 (API level 33) or higher", and that if I don't update before August 30, I won't be able to update them afterwards :s. I appreciate any information.

Jeffm2

I really am excited about the video feature as it opens possibilities for creating learning games and modules. Are there plans to incorporate controls in the video?

Armelline

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/619433#Comment_619433

Have also received these emails. Hoping we can get things updated in time! (Just re-read the original post and it sounds like you're already tackling this.)

AHBGames

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/619435#Comment_619435

Thanks for answering @Armelline , hopefully the update will be soon, so I can update the apps on time.

RedRobo

Yep, just got this warning too. Looks like Google are getting much stricter and more impatient about updates!

Binny

Publishing 2 seems to be very helpful. I think it would make the settings of the app easier.

Thank you for applying adaptive icons. (This is a necessary part for featured and play pass.)

I'm really looking forward to it.

Armelline

@adent42 Are the login servers part of these database changes? Just got booted off and getting an invalid response when trying to log back in (Mac app).

freneticz

Aaaaaah i cant login, i cant code @adent42

Fat0Programmer

I receieve the following message when I attempt to login:

" Unable to login right now. Status code is

InternalServerError."

Please help me. My life work is stuck in there...

AshumBesher

On Windows Creator I keep getting the message "Unable to publish while offline."

Armelline

We're back in action!

adent42

Sorry about that. We were tweaking our firewall and added a half baked block rule!

adent42

RC has been pushed, but we're testing it so it's "unannounced".

If you'd like to roll the dice, go ahead and hit that Build RC button!

adent42

AAAAND, testing failed. Since it worked in or dev environment, it's likely a config issue so it likely won't take long to track down.

adent42

K, figured out the issue and a test with Admob test credentials was successful! General guidance for this RC if you want to try this before we finish testing:

• If you don't have ads or IAP you're a-okay to go.
• If you have Ads, admob works and the others will likely works too, but you should test.
• If you have IAP, we haven't tested that at all yet.

adent42

Still looking into the RC. It seemed to work but that was only if we didn't change the package name. We're hoping to have a fix up later today.

smurfted

In no form of arcade, in any type of browser, can i get it to go full screen. It always says "Sorry, your browser does not support full screen playback."

adent42

@smurfted thanks for pointing that out, we found the issue and should have a fix up soon. We forgot to add a allowfullscreen attribute on the game's iframe!

Jeffm2

Are there any chances that the "check for updates" desktop function wil be fixed?

adent42

I need to double check, but I think it working as of 103, BUT we haven't officially updated the feed that reports the updates yet. 105 was a sort of RC, but since it's more-or-less stable, I'll push feed update soon and see what happens!

Simple Gamer Arts

Did anyone get the new updated GameSalad Viewer for Android to work? Mine still says "Connected to Wifi / GameSalad Creator not found"...

Yes, my gamesalad on my MAC detects it, I press play on it, but, nothing happens.... I imagine since the GameSalad Viewer says it can't find it..."

I use an HONOR X7 phone

adent42

@Simple Gamer Arts , while we look into this you can publish your game and use the QR code flow for now. I'll let you know if we find anything.

Simple Gamer Arts

Hi @adent42 and thank you,

I successfully used the QR code about 1 month ago with the Android gamesalad viewer, but I tried it last night, several times, and it was unsuccessful.

I think the QR code worked before your Nov 2nd update. Just an observation. I might be wrong