State of GameSalad on 4-17-2013
CodeWizard
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 1,143
Hello everyone and welcome to the first “state of GameSalad” post! In these posts, I’ll be covering what we’re working on now and how things are progressing on the roadmap. I’ll be aiming to post one of these each week. And, barring any vacation or other circumstances you should see them like clockwork. Let’s dig right in...
Native Engine
This first thing on my list to talk about is the “Lua free” native engine. This has been talked about for a long time and you should know where it’s at and how we’re going to get these critical improvements to you.
The good news is that we’ve made a lot of progress toward improving the engine through this work. Sadly, we’ve run into some issues that are making us rethink how we’ll roll these changes out to you. We need to be extra careful so that we don’t break your existing games and in-progress work.
To that end, we’re refocusing our efforts on bringing the various improvements to you in a more iterative way. By that, I mean we’ll be optimizing the existing Lua-based engine using what we’ve learned while working on the native engine. When possible, we’ll also bring over any applicable native engine work directly.
The goal is to get optimizations and engine improvements into your hands more quickly and with less risk to your projects. I’m sure we can all agree that’s a good approach. You’ll start seeing the fruits of this effort very soon.
An ongoing critical priority for us will be to iterate on optimizing the engine and laying the groundwork to make more sophisticated features like joints, skeletal animation, custom physics shapes, custom fonts and multiplayer a reality. Expect regular status updates on this work each week.
More Rapid Releases
The next thing to talk about is how we’re working toward a more rapid release schedule for the engine and tools. We will be providing regular release of work-in-progress engine and tool builds to all of our pro users. These builds will include our most recent work, bug fixes and optimizations. They will also allow pro users to see new features earlier and provide critical feedback needed to ensure they’re meeting your expectations before general release.
We’ll be actively participating on the forums with you to help address any issues that you see in these pre-release builds. Once they’re available, feel free to take advantage of them to help shape the future direction of GameSalad!
The goal here is to close the feedback loop between you and us more rapidly. We want your feedback on bug fixes, features and optimizations as soon as possible. There’s no better way to do that than to get builds in your hands sooner! We’re currently finalizing the systems required to make this a reality. I can’t wait to start getting you involved earlier in the development process! I’ll have more to say about this next week.
Mac Creator Improvements
We’re currently in the final stretch of a major improvement pass on the Mac creator. This work is focusing on increasing the stability of creator and making future feature additions easier for us to deliver. Since this is a major project, we’ll be baking it for a while longer before releasing it to the pro users for feedback. We’re pretty excited about how this work is improving the creator and I’m looking forward to getting your feedback on how this affects your projects. Delivery to you is several weeks out, so keep an eye out for coming status updates!
Additional Platform Support
We have some engineering resources working to add support for additional publishing platforms. The first of these will be available to you in the next few weeks. We’re excited to say this new platform will give you another great opportunity to reach more customers! More details will be forthcoming as they are available.
Summary
I’m still getting up to speed on everything here at GameSalad. We have a lot of work ahead of us and are committed to improving our build delivery process and rapidly iterating on engine / tool improvements. We’ll be focused on fixing bugs, improving performance, finishing the creator improvements and finalizing the additional platform support for the next few weeks.
Next week’s post will dive into more detail about coming optimizations and improvements. I’ll also try to shed more light on the medium term roadmap for you. We’re still finalizing these things ourselves. Once we’re clear internally then I’ll make sure you know.
Thanks for reading and you’ll hear from me again next week!
Native Engine
This first thing on my list to talk about is the “Lua free” native engine. This has been talked about for a long time and you should know where it’s at and how we’re going to get these critical improvements to you.
The good news is that we’ve made a lot of progress toward improving the engine through this work. Sadly, we’ve run into some issues that are making us rethink how we’ll roll these changes out to you. We need to be extra careful so that we don’t break your existing games and in-progress work.
To that end, we’re refocusing our efforts on bringing the various improvements to you in a more iterative way. By that, I mean we’ll be optimizing the existing Lua-based engine using what we’ve learned while working on the native engine. When possible, we’ll also bring over any applicable native engine work directly.
The goal is to get optimizations and engine improvements into your hands more quickly and with less risk to your projects. I’m sure we can all agree that’s a good approach. You’ll start seeing the fruits of this effort very soon.
An ongoing critical priority for us will be to iterate on optimizing the engine and laying the groundwork to make more sophisticated features like joints, skeletal animation, custom physics shapes, custom fonts and multiplayer a reality. Expect regular status updates on this work each week.
More Rapid Releases
The next thing to talk about is how we’re working toward a more rapid release schedule for the engine and tools. We will be providing regular release of work-in-progress engine and tool builds to all of our pro users. These builds will include our most recent work, bug fixes and optimizations. They will also allow pro users to see new features earlier and provide critical feedback needed to ensure they’re meeting your expectations before general release.
We’ll be actively participating on the forums with you to help address any issues that you see in these pre-release builds. Once they’re available, feel free to take advantage of them to help shape the future direction of GameSalad!
The goal here is to close the feedback loop between you and us more rapidly. We want your feedback on bug fixes, features and optimizations as soon as possible. There’s no better way to do that than to get builds in your hands sooner! We’re currently finalizing the systems required to make this a reality. I can’t wait to start getting you involved earlier in the development process! I’ll have more to say about this next week.
Mac Creator Improvements
We’re currently in the final stretch of a major improvement pass on the Mac creator. This work is focusing on increasing the stability of creator and making future feature additions easier for us to deliver. Since this is a major project, we’ll be baking it for a while longer before releasing it to the pro users for feedback. We’re pretty excited about how this work is improving the creator and I’m looking forward to getting your feedback on how this affects your projects. Delivery to you is several weeks out, so keep an eye out for coming status updates!
Additional Platform Support
We have some engineering resources working to add support for additional publishing platforms. The first of these will be available to you in the next few weeks. We’re excited to say this new platform will give you another great opportunity to reach more customers! More details will be forthcoming as they are available.
Summary
I’m still getting up to speed on everything here at GameSalad. We have a lot of work ahead of us and are committed to improving our build delivery process and rapidly iterating on engine / tool improvements. We’ll be focused on fixing bugs, improving performance, finishing the creator improvements and finalizing the additional platform support for the next few weeks.
Next week’s post will dive into more detail about coming optimizations and improvements. I’ll also try to shed more light on the medium term roadmap for you. We’re still finalizing these things ourselves. Once we’re clear internally then I’ll make sure you know.
Thanks for reading and you’ll hear from me again next week!
Comments
- Alex
I'm glad the hear about LUA. That it's making progress. But I have a question that is hard to answer.
-When do you think LUA is done? Before this summer, after summer. This year, next year?
When will the engine be done? That's a big question. Hard to answer because we're going to be working on improving it for a long time.
The goal is to keep iterating on the engine and tool. That means more fixes, optimizations and features on a regular basis. Getting the nightly builds will let you see this progress more rapidly. If you haven't upgraded to pro, you might want to consider it!
Great stuff !!!
This means that we all get an improved engine, pro and free! It's just that the pro users will get it sooner.
Have a great weekend @CodeWizard and all others of course too
The first bout of optimisations, the stuff we should start seeing soon, any heads up of what this is primarily focussing on?
Regarding the actual post. Its soooo refreshing to see this kind of of openess
because I have serveral ideas ready to built, so it would be great to hear if these behaviours will be ready soon.
The first optimizations will be focused on loading times.
@TooClever
We'll do our best not to break existing projects. And, if we do make a change that breaks your work, we'll be sure to make it clear to you. No idea on Windows 7 though.
@Approw
We have a lot of code cleanup and reorganization to do before we can tackle joints. Keep your eye on my weekly posts to see how things are progressing.
You must be the best addition to GameSalad next to @SaladStraightShooter
Thanks!
Approw