🏎️ Introducing blazing fast game loading

When making a large game with GDevelop, the size of the resources (images, 3D models, audio files...) to load used to make the game longer to load. The new version of GDevelop eliminates completely this problem, by loading only the resources of the first scene, and then progressively the rest of the game in background - without interrupting the game as much as possible.

🎆 This is perfect for web games, playable ads or playing games on slow internet connections. This also allows to create custom loading screens if needed.

Here is an exemple of a game launching very quickly, then displaying an intermediate loading screen. Note that this intermediate loading screen would not be shown if the game loaded fast enough:

The games now launch much faster by loading resources in the background:

• Only the first scene and global objects resources (images, sounds, 3D models etc...) will be downloaded during launch of the game. This usually allows for a very fast loading time (especially if your first screen is very lightweight).
• Other scenes resources will continue to load in the background. It has no impact on the game performance as this is done on other threads by the browser or the engine running the game.
• Scenes are loaded in the order they are listed in the project manager. You can also use actions and expressions to prioritize a scene (if it's known that a level will be needed soon for example) or read the current loading progress. This allows to create lightweight scenes that can act as custom loading screens. Otherwise, the launch loading screen will be shown if a scene is still loading when launched.
• Read more about this on GDevelop's documentation.

💬 New Discord channels dedicated to Professionals, "Gold" creators and Education plan owners.

You can now register your Discord username on your GDevelop profile. If you have a Gold, Startup or Education subscription, head down to your profile, to claim access to a premium channel on Discord, where you can discuss together and ask for support.

💝 Improvements

• The games dashboard is now more accessible, you can open it from the app home page and the project manager.
• Add actions to tween effect properties.
• Use a drop-down list for object effect parameters.
• Add an action to draw a torus with the shape painter object (Thanks @trp02!)
• Improved structure and array variables completion: when a structure variable name is entered in an expression, completions will also be provided for children variables.
• In extensions, the new variable syntax is now used when generating expressions and actions for properties.
• The Fling Game tutorial is back in the Learn section.
• Improve navigation for extensions in the documentation.
• Allow to increment position of points of sprites and vertices of collision masks by 0.5 in the editor
• Allow to set 3D models dimensions with a scaling factor
  • It allows to keep consistent dimensions for a set of 3D models

🐛 Bug fixes

• Fix 3D light rotation angle calculus when Y is the top
  • In order to get back the same light result as before, 27° should be subtracted to the rotation angle.
• Fix suggestion to add missing object variable that is used in events
• Fix property name case in action sentences
• Fix possible crash in the New Object Dialog.
• Fix empty sub-menu: add placeholder in desktop main menu when no recent project file.
• Do not change homepage tab at opening if an item from the asset store is requested.
• Prevent crash when receiving an unexpected response when fetching user cloud projects.

⚙️ Extensions

Reviewed extensions

• Promote Poki and CrazyGames extensions to the reviewed list
• [Object stack] Fix a crash when an object is deleted before any stack exists
  • The "move" actions can now move several stacks at once.
• [Cancellable draggable] Use seconds instead of milliseconds
• [CrazyGames] Upgrade to version 2.x of CrazyGames SDK

🎨 Assets

• New premium bundle by GDevelop: Produce Farm

🕹 Examples

• [Kondlike Solitaire] Fix cards positions after a drag is cancelled

🛠 Internal changes (for developers)

• Use JSX for rendering in game debugger message.
• Update Emscripten version to 3.1.21 (Thanks @arthuro555!)
  • Any developer working on the C++ codebase should follow again the README to install latest Emscripten version and re-compile C++.
• Automatically generate TypeScript definitions for GDCore (thanks @arthuro555!)