New beta release: UAT 1.4 beta3

[NiCoX]

Hi all,

Just to let you know that a new UAT beta release (1.4.beta3) is available on the beta web site. Among the various enhancements and bug fixes, this new version brings:

- GPU accelerated skinning on mobile devices
- dynamic shadows on Tegra powered hardware
- dynamic shadows on Flash
- new startup sequence on Android, faster and without "black screen"

More details on: http://beta.stonetrip.com

[giggsy]

This is simply great!

[feng3d]

Thanks! Downloading....

[Strokey44]

Thanks for all the work improving Android. Getting ready to release 3 games on it in the next 2 months. I did a test build of one of my games, starts up faster, and runs great.

[_geo_]

Excellent News, thx

[Santo]

In order to install the beta 3 do i need to uninstall the previous uat?
ah, i forgot...THX!!!!!!

[michax]

Great news!

NicoX, are there plans to improve engine loading times on flash ? Asking because i don't know if it will stay at current level with pretty long loading times.

Otherwise great work!

[peter]

Awesome.
I wonder why it costs only 200$. It is much for indie devs, but shiva's features are so great!

[NiCoX]

Hi,

NicoX, are there plans to improve engine loading times on flash ? Asking because i don't know if it will stay at current level with pretty long loading times.

Yes, as explained in the private part of the forum, we did not found the time yet to work on the planned Flash optimizations, but we should do it during next weeks. Now, about the startup in particular, suggest you to start the game with some splash screen, delaying most of the loaded assets after the first engine/game frame. Indeed the engine is running in the Flash VM, and memory accesses are way longer than with native C/C++ code.

[michax]

Maybe new Alchemy (available in preprelease) could help with further optimisation of loading time. I saw samples from preprelease and memory access is like native one. Also with alchemy 2 porting become a lot easier. Of course i don't know about final usage, as it's prerelease.

[dreamora]

Question is if they even use Alchemy.
Unity for example doesn't and its very well possible that Stonetrip does not use it either for cross compilation reasons of stonescript

[michax]

Don't know what is used specificly but for sure Shiva and Unity both use two premium flash features:
- domain memory
- stage 3d
As i get adobe overlay message.

Unity loading times are a lot faster then current shiva ones. Don't know what they did but i hope Shiva will achieve similar engine boot time

[dreamora]

And both will likely offer the same checkbox to get rid of premium: fallback of rendering to cpu
as the memory op removal degenerates the performance by up to 90%+ leaving it totally unusable for anything more than advertisement banners, if at all

[michax]

Ok, i need to take back my complains about loading times With flash 11.3, Azoth and Distribution it only takes 4s That's awesome! Great work guys!