I Left Buildbox One Year Ago, And I'm Back (+ News About Bbhook And Bbbuilder)

Discussion in 'Buildbox General Discussion' started by EZKad, Dec 3, 2018.

  1. EZKad

    EZKad Avid Boxer

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    Hello community,

    Some times ago I left buildbox for lack of time and also because the limitations on BB2 by the time.
    After watching some videos of BB3 I think it's really promising so I decided to give it a try again, mainly because it provide an official API (yay *\^_^/*) .

    I didn't logged in this forum during a long period and I just discovered that many people contacted me mainly about BBBuilder and BBHook to integrate 3rd party SDKs on buildbox games.
    I'm so sorry I didn't responded in time, so here a summary of the questions I got :

    Q1 - BBHook have some issues with Buildbox 2.3.x can you help me fixing it .
    A1 - I'll update BBHook tutorials with a cleaner code and fixing compatibility with 2.3.x version.

    Q2 - Can modify my game code to integrate BBHook for me ? (I can pay for it)
    A2 - Sorry I really don't have time for such tasks, I'll try to make the tutorials as clear as possible so you can do it alone if you have notions of code, or provide the tutorials to a developer who can implement them.

    Q3 - Will you provide similar Hook for BB3 ?
    A3 - I looked into BB3 exports and I think I can definitely write a BBHook for it, that being said, I'm not sure if it'll be useful since BB3 will have an official API, if I see that BBHook have any added value for BB3 I'll provide one.

    Q4 - I'm struggling to build my Buildbox games with Android Studio (Eclipse for older versions), can you help me build my game.
    A4 - BBBuilder adressed this issue by providing a right click action (on windows machines) to build the game without installing eclipse, I'll check the possibilities to provide a similar approach for the new Buildbox exports (which use Android Studio), I can only provide such approach for windows users, since adding a right click action is more complex on MacOs and Linux (if anyone knows about a simple solution I can add it).



    PS. For those who don't know what's BBHook and BBBuilder check the following links :
     
  2. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    We have now custom ad hook and custom code trigger button. The hack is not needed anymore like you did it.

    It’s awesome to have you back though. Interested to hear your opinion about BB3 and it’s strength and weakness.
     
  3. EZKad

    EZKad Avid Boxer

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    @Christoph : Yes the AdIntegrator and code trigger are definitely good moves !, but I think there are still situations where we need hacks, for example unlocking achievements depending on the score, or calling a 3rd party API on game start or on gameover ....etc

    Regarding BB3,
    The most noticable strength for me is the API, I just hope that Buildbox team will extend it with more functions so we can create and share awesome custom assets.
    even if non-developers don't see this as important, but this will provide the developers community the ability to create custom assets to do different kind of things which are not possible with the default assets, BB3 extensions will no more be tied to new releases, it'll evolve continuously and this is a key point of success for any game engine.


    Some weaknesses I see for now :
    - Lack of 3D animations imports (walkcycles ...etc)
    - Creating composite character is a pain, I saw the tutorial, and tbh, manipulating object coords of 3D models to put them in the right place of the character is not productive at all, a better solution would be to provide the possibility to save a whole hierarchi (node + children) as asset, and for children 3D models to provide an interface where we can use the 3d manipulation tools to move the different parts.
    - Lack of multiplayer possibility (but this one could be fixed/hacked if the API provides enough extensibility)

    other points/bugs I notices and that I'll report, but I'll wait to explore more, and see the offcial release since they seem too obvious to me to be present (for example the advanced scenes ordering tool, some physics bugs ...etc)
     
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  4. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    There’s screen on enter and scree on exit as well...

    Yeah, I haven’t touched Buildbox 3 since June. Just too limited and buggy. I can’t see the official release changing anything either. My guess is that it will take until summer 2019 to be really usable.

    Until then Buildbox 2 it is. Maybe some unity tutorials in between you never know right? :)

    What have you done in the meantime? Any game development news?
     
  5. EZKad

    EZKad Avid Boxer

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    I was busy on some B2B games projects (mainly educative and serious games) to make some cash.
    I also have other business projects which make my main revenue sources and take most of my time :D

    and now I'm considering to give my BB2 game a second chance, and maybe experiment some stuff with BB3 (beta4 is promising btw but I agree still buggy).

    as many indies here, I hope that I can develop gamedev activity to make it my main source of revenue or at least 50% of it ... but it's not simple :D
     
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  6. Christoph

    Christoph Miniboss Boxer

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    You know what we were trying to achieve with Buildbox 2 games is a webview cross promotion window. The same way Voodoo or Ketchapp are doing it. Basically a small GIF in the Game Over Menu... do you think something like that would be possible with Buildbox 2?
     
  7. EZKad

    EZKad Avid Boxer

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    I think it's possible, many Ad networks actuallty use webviews to display their ads, so the idea is to code something like this.
    but there might be some surprises, I already worked on native apps that include webviews, and sometimes it makes the application crash for no reason. maybe there are already stable frameworks that allow doing that in a clean way, I'll check and add this to my todo list :)
     
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  8. AaroArts

    AaroArts Miniboss Boxer

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    Welcome back @EZKad.
    It's great that developers like you are willing to share resources.

    I also think BB3 has great potential, but I'm probably not going to start using it until the official release. (Too busy with BB2 right now).
    It's great to hear what experienced Buildboxers think about how BB is moving forward.

    I look forward to your future contributions.
     
  9. EZKad

    EZKad Avid Boxer

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    Thank you @AaroArts , I think that sharing such resources helps everyone including me, sometimes I forget how to do things or don't have time to restart the whole process of reflexion/conding/etc... so I just go back to my history and voilà !

    @Christoph just wanted to let you know that I made a little test with a webview on android and it's working. I'll add it a a demo in my next tutorial.

    I still didn't tested on iOS as I'm not very familiar with ObjectiveC but I think that there is a possibility :)

    I'll separate android and iOS tutorials for simplification.
     
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  10. rraallvv

    rraallvv Boxer

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    @EZKad I found your tutorial about adding the hooks layer to BB2, thanks for sharing. The reason I was looking for something like that is that I need a way to "buy" digital assets that are not part of the game using in-game currency. So, for instance players could have an option in the game to tap a button and get some rewards from my app for certain amount of in-game coins. Do you think that's posible using your approach with the hooks layer on BB2. How about doing it entirely on the Java side of the app triggering some function with with an URL button on the game, is it posible to get access to the score and change it from that function? Thanks.
     
  11. antigoos

    antigoos Boxer

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