Only one month after the last major update 1.4.0, we added so many improvements we decided to release another major update! Read on to see what’s inside version 1.5.0:
- New Ad plugins for Chartboost and AdMob
- Simplified Windows Installation
- Add support for Ubuntu 13.04
- Support resolution-changes of GameWindow at runtime and add full-screen support for desktop publishing
- Add Flurry plugin for BlackBerry 10
Ad Plugins for Chartboost and AdMob
After high demand from our community we now fully support ads on iOS & Android with the new Chartboost and AdMob plugins. The AdMob plugin supports both interstitials and non-interstitials ad types, while the Chartboost plugin is specialized for advertising games, making it a perfect fit for Felgo. So in addition to the existing Store plugin for in-app purchases and paid downloads, you can now also use ads to monetize your game effectively.
Simplified Windows Installation
Installing Felgo with Microsoft Visual Studio compiler (MSVC2010) was a bit tedious on Windows, as the Windows SDK 7.1 needed to be installed in the first place. With the new support for MinGW, installation is now easier and removes any external dependencies. Thus we select it as the default compiler for new installs starting with release 1.5.0. At updating your existing installation with the Felgo SDK Maintenance Tool, you can choose to continue using MSVC2010 which is the default setting, switch to the new MinGW toolchain, or have them both installed if you prefer.
Ubuntu 13 Support
The update 1.5.0 also brings good news for our customers using Linux as their preferred development environment: We added support for Ubuntu 13.04. You can follow our installation instructions for Linux to get started.
GameWindow Enhancements
One of the most popular questions we get from developers is how to support all kind of devices with their different aspect ratios and resolutions with a single code base. The GameWindow and Scene concept allows you to exactly do that, and is explained in a tutorial How to create mobile games for different screen sizes and resolutions.
With the latest version 1.5.0, testing your game for different resolutions gets a lot easier: You can now switch to any screen size during testing on your desktop, just by resizing the window while your app is running! You can enable this feature by setting the new resizeable property. Or by switching to the most popular screen sizes like iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPad, or Google’s Nexus devices with a simple keystroke of Ctrl + 1-7. For a full list of predefined shortcuts, see this part of the GameWindow documentation.
If you publish your game to one of the supported desktop platforms Windows or Mac OS X, you can now use the fullscreen property of GameWindow to make the best of the screen real estate. By pressing Ctrl + F you can even toggle the fullscreen mode during runtime and can thus fully focus on your game without getting distracted during testing!
Flurry Analytics Support for BlackBerry 10
To top off this new major release, 1.5.0 adds support for the Flurry plugin on BlackBerry 10. Flurry is the leading analytics SDK which significantly helps to improve your game, and we are glad to provide it to all developers targeting BlackBerry App World.
As usual, you can find the full changelog of this update and how to install it here. Happy coding. 🙂
