Gideros 2024.9 Released

hgy29

Hi everyone,

I have just released Gideros 2024.9. Not because it brings many new features, but because it had many minor changes not released for months. Perhaps the only notable addition is TextureBase:update() call, which allows to upload a new image (from raw bytes) to an already existing texture.

Full change set:

Improvements

[plugin/iab] Use Billing library v7.0 on Android
[plugin/ads] Use latest GMS version
[plugin/iab] Use latest Amazon IAP SDK
[android/iab] Allow GooglePlay IAB to fallback to old API
[export/ios] Set supported orientations in Info.plist
[gfx/fontbase] Add TLF_TABLE to enable table like layout
[gfx/texture] Add TextureBase:update() API to change an existing texture content
[Library] Update UI Library

Fixes

[export/apple] Handle setFps on MacOS
[gfx/path] Fix line length computation

Download it from here:
http://giderosmobile.com/download

kinrpg

Unfortunately, the problem of Gideros Player not opening still persists. All other tools are working.

Edit: And a few more feedback. The linux version correctly performed the Gideros Player, including exporting the final executable to windows and running via Wine. I copied the files to another notebook with windows 10 and... It did not work, the game appears in the window manager, consuming memory and processing at the correct average value but no window is displayed on the screen.

Another test was with the Controller plugin. In linux I ran the game with the active plugin and immediately it closed the gideros player window. In the encarting if I export to windows and run it using wine, the plugin works and recognizes the control buttons normally.

Xman

on Mac, click the Starts Gideros Player button will open the player, but it can not connect.
I try some old releases, 2020.11.1 work fine.

pie

Xman said:

on Mac, click the Starts Gideros Player button will open the player, but it can not connect.
I try some old releases, 2020.11.1 work fine.

It's an issue that happens since some release ago
from the top menu try Player> Player Settings.. and fill in your player ip (which you can see in the player itself)

hgy29

Xman said:

on Mac, click the Starts Gideros Player button will open the player, but it can not connect.
I try some old releases, 2020.11.1 work fine.

Probably some security restriction Apple enabled recently. I will have to investigate, but I don't often use my Mac for development.

hgy29

hgy29 said:

I will have to investigate, but I don't often use my Mac for development.

I tried just now and it worked perfectly on my Mac: the newly open player is seen in the detected players bars and connected automatically.
The only case were it doesn't work is when I forget to close some other Gideros Studio running on another computer in the same network: that other Studio would steal the Mac player connection...

Xman

It seems the studio will not connect to the player automatically.
only change the player ip or click Localhost Toggle will start the connection.

MoKaLux

RenderTarget seems to be broken on android

I have an "old" app that worked on android. It uses renderTarget to draw pixels. On latest Gideros the clear function seems not to be working?

I looked into Gideros source code but couldn't find something specific to android. I searched GH and thought that was this issue: https://github.com/gideros/gideros/issues/241 so I tested on my 3 android phones and the issue persists on all of them.

I suspect something along those fixes https://github.com/search?q=repo:gideros/gideros+RenderTarget&type=commits

this one in particular: https://github.com/gideros/gideros/commit/a35285d872aa1795e2f33d5d2a73054c32d92878 (17 August 2021)

My app was made before 17 August 2021 and I didn't update it until today

Unfortunately for some reasons I cannot compile Gideros from source anymore

Could somebody possibly confirm they have this issue?

Thank you

PS: rendertarget clear works as expected when exporting to win Qt!
PS2: I tried with an apk build, my app works fine, it's only rendertarget:clear that is not working
PS3: I can share the code or make a smaller one to show my issue

hgy29

Hi @MoKaLux, yes it would be great if you could share a small test code to reproduce the issue

MoKaLux

thank you hgy29 and sorry for the delay
I have this sample code:

-- rendertarget clear on android bug? application:setBackgroundColor(0x00557f) local mydrawingsprite = Sprite.new() local mytilert = RenderTarget.new(256, 256, false, { pow2=false } ) local mytilebmp = Bitmap.new(mytilert) mydrawingsprite:addChild(mytilebmp) stage:addChild(mydrawingsprite) -- some vars local brush = Pixel.new(0xff0000, 1, 1, 1) brush:setAnchorPoint(0.5, 0.5) local mycolor = 0xffffff -- initial starting color local coorx, coory = 0, 0 local ecoorx, ecoory = 0, 0   -- mouse events mytilebmp:addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_DOWN, function(e) if mytilebmp:hitTestPoint(e.x, e.y) then coorx, coory = mytilebmp:globalToLocal(e.x, e.y) ecoorx, ecoory = math.floor(coorx), math.floor(coory) brush:setColor(mycolor) cursorS1(ecoorx, ecoory) e:stopPropagation() end end) mytilebmp:addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_MOVE, function(e) if mytilebmp:hitTestPoint(e.x, e.y) then print("x", e.x, e.y) -- this works on android coorx, coory = mytilebmp:globalToLocal(e.x, e.y) ecoorx, ecoory = math.floor(coorx), math.floor(coory) cursorS1(ecoorx, ecoory) e:stopPropagation() end end) mytilebmp:addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_UP, function(e) e:stopPropagation() end)   function cursorS1(coorx, coory) mytilert:clear(mycolor, 1, coorx, coory, 4, 4) -- this doesn't work on android end

This working sample (you can copy/paste) demonstrates my issue. Drag your mouse/finger to draw:
- on desktop Gideros Player this works as expected
- on android Gideros Player rendertarget doesn't seem to work

PS: I also tried with touch events but still didn't work on android

hgy29

Good news @MoKaLux, I managed to reproduce and fix it: https://github.com/gideros/gideros/commit/9b410ae6c2f3af74ce2f942d9dde49a7aec86cde
It actually could have caused rendring troubles in other cases too, perhaps crashes.

keszegh

btw this reminds me that in the past just shortening the index array of a Mesh using resizeIndexArray was enough to 'hide the end of the mesh', yet recently this lead to glitches and i fixed this by resizing also the vertex, texturecoordinate and color arrays.

hgy29

@keszegh, it could be related, but maybe not. If you can reproduce it then I'll have a look, because I want Gideros to be as clean as possible.

keszegh

@hgy29 , it took me an hour to reproduce the bug in a nice little example, but finally here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/frf9r8mo338mlwm1kwgfm/MeshGlitchTest.zip?rlkey=wxl4d7r8rfpra8ww9i7azssih&dl=0
if you comment out the two lines

meshArray[j]:resizeVertexArray(4*currmod) meshArray[j]:resizeColorArray(4*currmod)

then all kinds of glitches will begin (at least for me). i'm testing on windows.

hgy29

@keszegh, thanks for the example. I was able to reproduce, understand anf fix the problem: https://github.com/gideros/gideros/commit/0783805a3e2db8e6bae31f08b9f8c6aab7f896a8
It was appearing because your code sometimes ended up to empty completely the index array, leading to 0 sized VBO which weren't properly handled.

keszegh

thank you @hgy29 , nicely done.

MoKaLux

hi Giderians
Just a little thing
In Gideros Studio, when you right click on Files it says that F3 would Refresh the file hierarchy.

On my windows machine it doesn't do it instead it iterates on any highlighted words I have in my code (that's a discovery for me and is in the wiki https://wiki.gideros.rocks/index.php/Getting_Started#Gideros_Studio_IDE_keyboard_shortcuts).

That's it from me

Happy Gideroing!

MoKaLux

I found a typo in tnt virtual pad which crashes the app. It should be scale:
https://github.com/gideros/gideros/blob/0783805a3e2db8e6bae31f08b9f8c6aab7f896a8/plugins/virtualpad/luaplugin/tntvirtualpad.lua#L1173

I am trying to rollback the math.distance to be lua code as this is faster! DONE

I am working on it and will push asap! DONE tested on windows and android Gideros Player
https://github.com/gideros/gideros/pull/569

EDIT: I changed all spaces to be tab, it doesn't look good in GH but looks good in Gideros Studio

EDIT2: I haven't used the fastest distance formula in the commit . I used:

local function distance(xA, yA, xB, yB) local dx = xB - xA local dy = yB - yA -- return (dx*dx + dy*dy)^0.5 -- much faster than math.sqrt return (dx^2 + dy^2)^0.5 -- the fastest end

The one I pushed to GH is the second fastest distance formula. With the new one we gain a little more ms
pls see: https://wiki.gideros.rocks/index.php/Math.distance#Alternatives

That should be good enough because I don't want to mess the GH commit. Please tell me if I should redo the commit

hgy29

MoKaLux said:

Please tell me if I should redo the commit

Don't bother, it is good enough that way

hgy29

MoKaLux said:

pls see: https://wiki.gideros.rocks/index.php/Math.distance#Alternatives

A new alternative is coming. With next Gideros, which will have an updated luau engine, you'll be able to write:

local p1,p2=vector(10,20),vector(30,40) local distance=#(p2-p1)

This will be twice as fast as current best method.

MoKaLux

hello hgy29, I am subscribed to Gideros GH and couldn't understand most of the new updates
As always you put a lot of work in this one too

Gideros is a beast under the hood

I have already updated the latest luau page https://wiki.gideros.rocks/index.php/Latest_Luau so we have an overview of latest changes

The next "challenge" will be to properly update the wiki with all the new good stuff

Thank you in advance for the next Gideros release hgy29

hgy29

@MoKaLux, maybe not all new luau features will land in Gideros, but I'd really like to benefit from native compilation they've been working on. I'll start experimenting with that in a few minutes.
Meanwhile I can already announce that next Gideros will introduce code breaking changes. I decided to drop support for vectors of 4 values in luau and only keep 3 values. I believe 'w' coordinate is rarely used anyway and it allows the save 20% of memory and gain performances. Vectors of four numbers where used to convey colors though, so I added another lua type for this specific purposes, since colors needn't to be 32 bit for each channel.
If you guys were using vectors of four values, then you'll have to find other ways.

MoKaLux

hgy29 said:

A new alternative is coming. With next Gideros, which will have an updated luau engine, you'll be able to write:

local p1,p2=vector(10,20),vector(30,40) local distance=#(p2-p1)

This will be twice as fast as current best method.

Some results on my machine https://wiki.gideros.rocks/index.php/Optimizations#Distance

More than 50% faster with vectors

PS: should have posted in Gideros 2024.11 Release thread

Viva Gideros, Viva Luau