I just deployed a new update that adds a new rendering engine. The current browser version should behave the same as the previous version, but exported games for desktop and mobile are now much faster since they use your GPU hardware properly. This new renderer is also a big part of the upcoming HTML port. I was hoping that I could fit in a few feature requests into this release, but it has already taken longer than I expected.
In addition to the new renderer, there are several bug fixes:
Raycast block now returns the distance to the closest object reliably when multiple objects are hit
Chained animations (playing an animation from another animation’s done output) now work correctly
Creating large objects (greater than 1 grid cell) in the user interface layer now has correct initial alignment
Flip/Rotate now interact properly. Also, there is a new option in the Flip settings called “lock flip axis”. When this is set, the object will always flip on the global x/y axis instead of its local axis when rotating.
Alpha block works properly on all exported platforms
Editing a sprite now updates the physics collision shape immediately (including all clones)
Editing physics properties now updates all clones immediately
I did a whole lot of testing, but there were lots of changes - please let me know if you find any problems and I’ll try to address them ASAP.
@grazer when playing SB3/2 when something happens that would prevent you from shooting (like dying) you wont always be able to shoot in a certain direction again once your gun comes back.
@grazer There seems to be a problem with exporting now. The game won’t run. I install it just fine on my phone, but then when I go to open it, it says that it’s “stopped.” This keeps happening endlessly and prevents the game from running at all.
I can really notice the difference when it comes to performance.
I had a game that used to freeze a lot when not in the embed link.
With this update, only “lags” when I have a lot of objects (like 100 moving objects or more). On embed mode doesn’t even lag. Beautiful.
But I indeed found some weird issues:
Gets even laggier than before when testing with the behaviors page open.
I think timers aren’t working correctly but I can test because of the issue mentioned above.
The background gets clipped whenever he feels like too.
You can also notice that when an animation is played it shows some blinky-white bars randomly.
Happens in others games too. At first, I thought it only happened on emitted objects but then I tested on other games and now I can’t seem to find what they have in common. Except for the fact that they are playing an animation but not all of the animated objects have this issue.
Hey @PixelPizza - thanks for the detailed report. I wouldn’t actually expect the browser engine to be significantly faster, so that’s surprising to hear. Even though it has a new rendering path, it works very similarly to how it did before.
The white artifacts during rotation is a due to a change in the way the texture mapping works. Regenerating the sprite sheet should fix it. To do that, just open the animation in the sprite editor and close it again. That should rebuild the sprite sheet and eliminate the white ghost edges.
Timers were not changed in any way, so they shouldn’t have been affected, but anything is possible. I’ll check them out - do you have am example of how they seem to be misbehaving?
I see the issue with the background, in your screenshot - I’ll investigate that as well.
Look at the SB3 boss (the blue ship and the diamond)
-The blue ship wont exit the animation and will freeze, and the diamond isnt playing its animations either.
-The lagspikes are the real dealbreaker here.
-I have no idea whats causing my ship to be unable to shoot in certain directions.
-The white screen while loading a level needs to go as well.
-occasionally, most of my sprites will end up showing the error, aka the red square or they show a default cube sprite.
@grazer in the 2nd link I sent (Awakening) if you press “S” the player will slide and play a slide animation.
It was meant to be over after a few seconds(timer was supposed to stop animation and movement). But if you don’t release the “S” key it will never stop both animation and movement.
I just deployed an update that fixes the missing background objects when scrolling.
I tested awakening, and opening the arm animation and then closing the window (so the sprite sheet gets rebuilt) fixes the white line issue. It doesn’t save though (since I’m not you), so you’ll need to do that to fix it for real
I cannot reproduce the issue where the slide animation won’t stop. If I hold the “s” key, the animation still stops. Did you fix this already, or am I doing something wrong?
I’ve been trying to reproduce the animation issues, but no luck. I tried adding the “Boss 3” ship to the “unused test level”, and it’s animations seemed to be playing ok. Would it be possible for you to set up the “unused test level” so that I can easily see what the problems are? SB3 is a really complex game, so it’s hard for me to tell where things are going wrong.
Red squares mean the images didn’t load, this could possibly due to the server being extremely busy, although the CDN should prevent that. Do you remember what time of day this was happening?
@Bdarty
It looks like the Admob SDK has changed, and that’s causing your crash. I’ll need to update Admob to fix it. Removing the Ad block temporarily will probably fix it until I get the fix in place.
@grazer it may only apply to objects that arent there from the start. Maybe spawning it it in?
The Blue boss is emitted from the spawning object, while the cannons it summons are either Spawned or emitted too, although I recall it being spawned.
Either way, I will gladly set up a system for the UTL, and maybe add some UI in order to allow manual spawning. However Ill have to do some further setting up in order to prevent people from exploiting this.
