• Hello [name]! Thanks for joining the GMC. Before making any posts in the Tech Support forum, can we suggest you read the forum rules? These are simple guidelines that we ask you to follow so that you can get the best help possible for your issue.

Discussion Looking for advice on promoting a bug ticket?

Stephane

Member
We're launching our game and are showing some great numbers. Our plan is to invest in our worldwide launch (70 countries), however we've run into one problem. We've integrated Google Firebase for our real-time multiplayer as well as analytics. We have also set up FB Deeplinking for seamless friend matching within our game. The problem is that GMS:2 will not let us utilize Deeplinking for iOS (Android is 100% working) as a result of GMS:2 compiling.

There's a bug ticket that is currently set to priority medium, and is not assigned to anyone.
https://bugs.yoyogames.com/view.php?id=28323#bugnotes

We believe that this feature is HUGE and will be a big growth driver for mobile games.

As a studio, we have had limited contact with Yoyogames, so I thought I post here and see if anyone has any recommendations. All I'm looking for right now is some expectation as to when this issue will be addressed. We're currently attempting a work-around.

Thanks!
 

Stephane

Member
How does Yoyo Games not have customer support for studios? Even a paid support service would be GREAT! Any communication on this would be great. To be clear, we're asking for access to a native iOS feature, or at least to find out if it's not going to be worked on, so that we can make other plans. I understand that Yoyo is busy, and that they need to prioritize their work accordingly, but it should come at the cost of indie studios like ours who champion their platforms. We're a substantial team with funding, that is currently rethinking our focus on GMS:2.
 

Ricardo

Member
I've been working professionally with GMS for about four years and I have faced these issues SO many times... I had hope things were going to be better with GMS2, but I was - unfortunately - wrong. "Send a ticket" or "Contact the support" someone will occasionally say here. It doesn't matter, really. If you have a critical issue and you can't find a workaround by yourself, you're doomed. Your bug is going to remain there in the bug track for months to come (if you're lucky, because a lot of them stay there for years if YoYo staff think is not critical). Even if you have the gift of have it fixed soon, it still can take 2 to 3 months to the fix to appear in next GMS2 release.
 

Stephane

Member
All they need is a proper structure for addressing issues like this. They could add a comment section to their bug tracker. They could invite people like us to become brand partners and repay us by being in contact. They could also have a paid support channel, where studios like ours could and would pay to get answers to issues in a timely manner. I'm hoping that I will hear something on this. We're in preproduction of our third project, which is by far our biggest yet (cross-platform including consoles). We're extremely excited about it and we currently leaning towards moving to Unity which is a shame, because we'd be giving up on our years of experience using GMS. Not only have do we create games in GMS, we also host online game jams and host fundraising in-studio workshops for children. It's important to us to be part of the community, and one of the best ways to do that is to share our skills and expertise. Yoyo is about to lose a partner, which is a real shame for both of us...but as a business, we need to make decisions that work best for our projects and our team. It currently looks like we'll be hosting Unity workshops and game jams in the future. :(
 

Stephane

Member
I just found a support email address for yoyogames and we now have a ticket in the support queue! I'll update here once (if) I've spoken with them.
 

Stephane

Member
So here's the reply I got back.

"Thank you for your message.

Our QA department will be re-evaluating all of the suggestions as we move them over to our Feature Request system.

We are unable to offer any insight into when the suggestion will be implemented.

I'm sorry that I couldn't be of more assistance to you."

And herein lies the problem. We're a fully funded studio with a consistent burn rate. We have a feature that is blocked by the engine we're using, not by any bugs, or technical limitations (that we know of) on our end. The company providing the engine does not share any information about the issue, leaving the studio to decide to either dump said feature, or invest thousands (via man hours) of dollars into creating a workaround. How can we make this decision? What if we invest thousands of dollars and Yoyo decides to release the feature in their next update? That money is wasted. A studio like ours, that actively promotes the engine and engages the community should have contact with the engine providers. Even Google, Apple and Facebook will assign someone to contact us when we're having a similar issue. Apple has even offered to feature our first game worldwide! Yoyo nothing, granted Yoyo is very small competitively, but it's WAY more in their interest to be transparent and communicative. We're treated like any other indie developer working out of their basement (no offense to the indies working out of their basements. We were once you!). This is totally unworkable.
 

Jack S

Member
So it's a bit harrowing but you CAN fix this yourself. You will need to go edit the GMS runtimes and do your app delegate work in the default xcode project. This will have to be redone every time the runtime is updated.

My studio has similar issues and have taken full control of our runtime. Their are a few things we haven't quite worked out - like where the build script is located so we can edit the actual steps / commands of the build pipeline - but most things are pretty obvious in the runtime level *IF* you know native platform development.

There are of course some things you can't get messing with the runtime. The runtime loads a compiled yoyo package for core features so for example you can't get rid of all the excessive on device network logging on android if you don't need / want that much detail / screen spew while debugging.
 

Stephane

Member
So it's a bit harrowing but you CAN fix this yourself. You will need to go edit the GMS runtimes and do your app delegate work in the default xcode project. This will have to be redone every time the runtime is updated.

My studio has similar issues and have taken full control of our runtime. Their are a few things we haven't quite worked out - like where the build script is located so we can edit the actual steps / commands of the build pipeline - but most things are pretty obvious in the runtime level *IF* you know native platform development.

There are of course some things you can't get messing with the runtime. The runtime loads a compiled yoyo package for core features so for example you can't get rid of all the excessive on device network logging on android if you don't need / want that much detail / screen spew while debugging.
Thanks for replying here! We are already using our own custom runtime which was required for our firebase integration. We looked into this issue (deeplinking on iOS) and concluded that it wasn't possible in our case, however, we may have overlooked something. You started by saying that we "can fix this", but the rest of your comments sound less sure. We would absolutely LOVE to fix this on our own if it's possible. Have you or your team looked into assessing the app delegate on iOS? For instance, do you know where the app delegate is accessed in the runtimes default project?
 

Jack S

Member
The Appdelegate code is in the default xcode project.... You will need to copy it over to a mac and edit it in xcode ....
 

Jack S

Member
Best of skill and luck - iOS is such a huge PITA I try and avoid it when I can. Android is soo much easier to work with and break outside of packaged box with.

Something else you might be able to do (I haven't done it like this since 1.4.x) is to intercept the build files on the mac (assuming you are building from a PC) and edit the xcode project and finish / sign it yourself over on the MAC. I used to have to do that all the time to get Vungle ads working on iOS and it sucks - every build having to go do all that. Since 2.x I've just edited the default xcode project since YoYo made that available in the runner to mess with.
 

Stephane

Member
Best of skill and luck - iOS is such a huge PITA I try and avoid it when I can. Android is soo much easier to work with and break outside of packaged box with.

Something else you might be able to do (I haven't done it like this since 1.4.x) is to intercept the build files on the mac (assuming you are building from a PC) and edit the xcode project and finish / sign it yourself over on the MAC. I used to have to do that all the time to get Vungle ads working on iOS and it sucks - every build having to go do all that. Since 2.x I've just edited the default xcode project since YoYo made that available in the runner to mess with.
We can not agree more! ;) As for the ads, are you using mediation? We have integrated Google AdMob meditation and are getting some really good results with one caveat, we are getting a crash on iOS (rare) that appears to be caused by our ads (loading), or a certain ad type. We've seen this crash with both Heyzap mediation and now with Admob, although it appears to be less frequent now that we've switched. The crash happens on startup for some users and will happen consistently for some period of time, could be hours, could be a couple days. Then everything starts running fine again. Again, I believe it's a certain ad type that is being targeted at the user at the time of the crashing. The only reason I mention this is on the off chance that you have experienced an ad related (iOS) crash as well. Either way, we'll let you know how things go with the runner/iOS stuff. We should get to it tomorrow. Cheers!
 

Stephane

Member
UPDATE: So... Yoyo Games has reached out to us directly and they have offered to work on the issue we're facing. This is way more than we expected! This is above and beyond on their part and I could not be more grateful. Looks like I have to take back some of what I said previously. ;) I still think Yoyo Games should create a developer channel in the forums, or via Google groups/email. Developers like us would have to apply and outline their projects and team sizes etc. Anyways, back to developing for us!! Cheers!
 

clee2005

Member
I have been in contact with Yoyo recently as well about the possibility of getting a pre-build command feature implemented which would allow us to copy let's say the google-services.json file into the root Android gradle folder... or rename the api_key.txt file for Amazon Login before building. This may solve our issues of having to manually modify things for each project build. I have no further details about when or how... but I'll try and post back here when I have more details. Glad to know there are others that are interested.
 
Top