State of GameSalad on 9-3-2013
CodeWizard
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 1,143
Hello! It's that time again... time for another weekly state of GameSalad post. It was a short week last week, so we're one day light on progress. Have mercy! 
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
Amazon in-app-purchase and GameCircle are in QA and being tested. There's one bug remaining for us to knock out. I fully expect this to be live next week.
QA is still digging through our first release candidate for 0.11.0. Once we're done with 0.10.4 we'll get back on this.
What’s New This Week?
1. I've been personally shepherding the async multiplayer contract with our third-party provider. We've achieved agreement on terms and have a draft agreement coming in days. Progress!
2. We're preparing to move to a new office in Austin. This is taking some time and will get a bit worse as it gets closer.
3. We have an offer out to an experienced web developer. Keep your fingers crossed that he'll accept!
4. The first part of the "great merge" of 2013 has taken place. The major rework of how we build our various projects is complete and has been moved into our nightly build branch. We'll be working through issues on this branch for the next week or so. Then we'll push out some nightly builds with our latest stuff!
5. Async multiplayer code optimization is underway. Specifically cleaning up how we handle converting game state into tables.
6. We have an engineer beginning work on the new sprite sheet and batching systems. Can't wait to see this bear some fruit! It's been a long time coming...
7. Still putting together the roadmap forum page. I've been too busy to make progress on this. Not forgetting it though!
8. We're fixing some nasty Windows 8 bugs that cause odd behavior when the game viewport changes sizes.
9. History Fighter multiplayer is making more progress this week. Some actual multiplayer gameplay is starting to take shape.
10. Progress on the new build / deployment server is taking place. Poor @BlackCloakGS. I don't envy him!
11. We've settled on an open source package called Scalr (http://www.scalr.com) to manage our server infrastructure. Now we get to watch our system administrator set that up and move all of our servers to it. Go sysadmin go!
Estimated Stable Build Schedule
Amazon in-app-purchase and GameCircle are in QA and being tested. There's one bug remaining for us to knock out. I fully expect this to be live next week.
QA is still digging through our first release candidate for 0.11.0. Once we're done with 0.10.4 we'll get back on this.
What’s New This Week?
1. I've been personally shepherding the async multiplayer contract with our third-party provider. We've achieved agreement on terms and have a draft agreement coming in days. Progress!
2. We're preparing to move to a new office in Austin. This is taking some time and will get a bit worse as it gets closer.
3. We have an offer out to an experienced web developer. Keep your fingers crossed that he'll accept!
4. The first part of the "great merge" of 2013 has taken place. The major rework of how we build our various projects is complete and has been moved into our nightly build branch. We'll be working through issues on this branch for the next week or so. Then we'll push out some nightly builds with our latest stuff!
5. Async multiplayer code optimization is underway. Specifically cleaning up how we handle converting game state into tables.
6. We have an engineer beginning work on the new sprite sheet and batching systems. Can't wait to see this bear some fruit! It's been a long time coming...
7. Still putting together the roadmap forum page. I've been too busy to make progress on this. Not forgetting it though!
8. We're fixing some nasty Windows 8 bugs that cause odd behavior when the game viewport changes sizes.
9. History Fighter multiplayer is making more progress this week. Some actual multiplayer gameplay is starting to take shape.
10. Progress on the new build / deployment server is taking place. Poor @BlackCloakGS. I don't envy him!
11. We've settled on an open source package called Scalr (http://www.scalr.com) to manage our server infrastructure. Now we get to watch our system administrator set that up and move all of our servers to it. Go sysadmin go!
Comments
Scalr looks cool, i'm in the process of setting up Puppet for some automation on our servers at my day job. Looks like scalr integrates with that well among other systems. Always more efficient to have one central management console for all servers then being all independent.
also, one day light on progress? *grumble *grumble come on GS!
Just kidding, this week looks good.
- Thomas
With regards to the office move, do you expect any periods of downtime for things like publishing our projects? If so, can you indicate timeframes?
The build next week only adds GameCircle and IAP support for Amazon as well as free Kindle Fire publishing.
Release 0.11.0 contains a bunch of optimizations and fixes. It's coming shortly after 0.10.4.
0.11 has everything else.
6. We have an engineer beginning work on the new sprite sheet and batching systems. Can't wait to see this bear some fruit! It's been a long time coming...
Will these sprites still be limited to a square and circle?
Be patient it's all coming. As they get the once off backend work done things will start to accelerate. This work is vital to producing solid builds in the future and avoiding constant issues. It might be an inconvenience now but when you see what it produces just down the road you'll be praising him for doing that work.
any headway on that overview of what type of information is collected? With iOS7 launching next week there will be a news Kids section on the app store, and they require a privacy policy to get in there. It'd be nice to be able to put together something with details on what is used.
Sprite sheets are an approach for organizing your images so that we can draw them more efficiently in the engine. Batching is a method that takes advantage of sprite sheets (among other things) to group image drawing so that we can draw more images at one time.
The result? Much higher and consistent frame rates in most cases.