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Hi,

Looking at the main AppGameKit website, we currently have the original AppGameKit Classic product, which recently had an update released on the 22nd May, and we also now have the Alpha version of AppGameKit Studio available to people whom have purchased a pre-release copy.

The Classic version has matured quite a bit, and the editor is stable and reliable as far as I can see. The Alpha version of AppGameKit Studio, is still ongoing, and therefore I can appreciate that this is yet to be completed. What I really want to know, is what are the underlying differences between the Classic version, and the new Studio version?

Without stating the obvious, the Studio IDE clearly has differences from IDE Classic, and the intellisense functionality and inbuilt documentation and media browser is a great facility, but are these the main differences?

I would like to be able to see a breakdown of the features that are going to be available in the Studio version, that are NOT present in the classic version.

The most significant differences that I can think of:
-new IDE support HiDPI screens
-new Vulkan rendering engine that promise improved performance but it is yet to be confirmed how much improvement we are talking about. Told the new engine is coming in May.. Can be significant in VR/AR games.
-improved debugger that allow you to add variables to watch list and follow their values as you program execute and even change their values manually and see the result in preview
-code properties that allow you to expose variables to the IDE and change those values from the IDE even during preview, can be useful in large project to expose values that you want to play around with during development
-asset browser that include preview of your assets, can be useful when you dealing with lots of them especially songs and music as you can also play them in the asset browser, then you can drag and drop assets in to the scene editor but also the code editor which is generating Tier1 code for you to load it and include the path. Can be useful to get your content loading script up and running faster and in general to find what you looking for.
-in case you have been using the Visual Editor DLC or the Placement Editor in Classic, Studio has a better version included which offer you to:
---store scenes within scenes which can be useful to organize levels in large games for example cities, house interiors and dungeons..
---layers to help organize background, foreground, GUI elements on to different layers
---drawing sprites
---positioning using a percentage system
---better ways to reference individual sprites in the scene from code
---ability to group sprites to reference a group of sprites in the scene from code
..and more to come

And this is the most important imo, more is coming in Studio, Classic going to receive only maintenance updates, bug fixes from now on but not forever. I don't expect Classic to receive new updates longer than a year or 6 months from the release of Studio, it would make no sense imo.

Also all the visual editing part in Studio, is totally optional, so if you don't want any of the scene editing and asset management features you are not forced to use it, it is there for convenient only. If you want to do everything from code the "Classic" way, you can.

Hi Zigi,

Thanks for the very comprehensive list. Clearly there are differences between the Studio and Classic versions. I assume that with the Alpha release version, the Scene Editor isn't yet available for playing around with? Well, I assume this because the IDE for the Alpha version of Studio, doesn't appear to contain any means for creating scenes as I'm eager to see these facilities when they're available.

I do have other questions to ask, but at the moment, as Studio is still in Alpha and there are other releases to come before it goes live, I will see how these updates pan out. But thank you for the list, much appreciated.

Paul.

The built-in Scene Editor is already available, Rick did share some videos demonstrating the new features as they were added:
Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0eDVD-wpc8
Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShQjV_tT3k0
Part3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuRYWGX3Bec
Part4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIObKXckckY

A great answer Zigi, thanks

To be honest, I think the issue I had, was that the YouTube channel, shows good stuff that's coming our way, but this wasn't clearly advertised on the AppGameKit site. Well, I don't think it was, but I am partially blind, so I may have missed it.

Paul.

No I don't think they advertised the videos. I think Rick posted the very first one and after that he was just keep uploading to YouTube each time a new feature was added but did not announced it. Sometime I did find out about the videos days and a week after if a community member posted it since I don't often login on youtube to check my subs.

To be honest, TGC doesn't seems to have a strong marketing strategy. If I were them, I would have launched a dev blog on the official page and the Steam page on day one, and post updates and videos there as the tool get developed and even if they do not want to do early access on Steam, they could have posted a link to the TGC page to pre-order here. I would have also posted an announcement on the Classic Steam page.
They could have certainly done a lot more not to mention a road map. To many people it is still unclear where Studio is going exactly but I have the feeling neither TGC have a clear idea since they just did a "what do you want next" type of survey recently with a text box to type anything we want which indicates it is open for debate where Studio is going which makes me a little concerned. But let's hope for the best.

Hi Zigi,

You raised some really strong points to be honest. This was the problem I had when it comes to the marketing strategy. I've already paid for AppGameKit v1, and AppGameKit v2, which are great dev tools, but when AppGameKit Studio was announced, this confused me to no end. I purchased it none the less because the website showed some great new features, but when I started using the Alpha version of the IDE, I was kind of asking myself, did I make the right decision?

I've grown with the tools from TGC, and being part of the DarkGDK.NET product dev team, I've always had great respect and admiration for the work that has been done by the team at TGC. But this is the first time that I have stopped and asked myself what the goal is with the new Studio version. At first, it felt like a competitive stab at tools such as GameMaker Studio by YoYo, offering cross platform game creation in a unified IDE and Scene/Asset management environment, but AppGameKit Studio stands on it's own two feet with the great simplicity of testing the solution right on your device using the player. And the scripting language is very easy to learn, borrowing from BASIC. So it could just be like you've said about the marketing strategy. In my opinion, the site needs to provide more content, so that we can see the big advantages of the new AppGameKit Studio version, because at the moment, without the YouTube videos you've linked us to, I wasn't really sure.

Paul.