Game Salad - Repeatable errors & Glitches; Stitching Levels - iDevices creator comes to the rescue

It has been a month since my last entry about the game app process using Game Salad. We have been busy promoting our WEBBY People's Voice Award nomination and I'm super happy to report we won! Hard work pays off.  During that time, Game Salad has released two updates to its program. Clearly, they are diligently working on fixing the problems with their software. But to that end, I'll do as I have done before and comment on some problems we have had. I know people don't enjoy criticism, but this isn't that. We're reporting our issues as beta testers in the hopes the Game Salad developers can identify the problems. It's a feedback thing.

We have found:

• That if you update to the latest version of Game Salad, actors lose some of their settings. Restitution to be exact. Be sure to check it if you discover a problem. 
• Sometimes when opening the game, it would regress to the previous session before the game was saved, which means it's not opening up on the latest saved version of your game.
• Some of the attributes within an actor will not engage until the actor is deleted from the scene and dragged back in, and yet some attributes do engage. Example: An actor with a display text rule that has already been put into the scene will still display "Hello World" even after the new text has been entered. So the actor had to be deleted from the scene and brought back in for the new text to show up.
• (Here's a big problem) Some actors who have a collide rule, say with a ceiling or platform actor, will ignore it and jump right through it and either (1) continue to zoom off screen into the ether or (2) come back down and land on top of the actor they were to be colliding with.
• We suspect it has something to do with the PNG. -  More specifically, if an actor box is created and a PNG is placed in it (a picture of a building) and that building actor is dragged to the scene and a collide rule is added to that actor, THEN another actor CAN NOT move through the newly built actor with the PNG.
• However, if you create an actor box and DON'T place a PNG into that actor box, and you drag the actor box into the scene and give it a collide rule, the other actors CAN pass through the newly created actor with no PNG. Perhaps, the issue is centered around the PNG aspect of an actor.
• We just tested this and it doesn't seem to hold. PNGs may make no difference to the actor moving through a collide rule.
• Resizing an actor in a scene causes glitches to the game play in preview.
• The "touch" rule didn't work until shutting down the system completely, once I quit out of Game Salad and relaunched it, the program reset and my "touch" command started working in preview mode.
• (Another big problem) After we updated to the latest version of Game Salad, the program restarts and the latest version of GS opens  - BUT the sound it is gone. Before we discovered that it is best to shut down the system AGAIN and relaunch to try and reset GS, we lost 3 hours trying to fix the sound. We when relaunched GB the sound came back on but we don't know why.
• IMPORTANT NOTE: When things aren't working correctly close down Game Salad and relaunch it. It seems to clear up some of the disfunction.

There are problems with Game Salad, but with time we have gotten better at working around them and to expect issues. On a positive note, Game Salad seems far more stable than ever before. I haven't experienced one crash. That's an enormous improvement.

Now we're ready to go to the next phase of building our game . Four of our five levels have been completed and we are ready to begin "stitching" (my term) the levels together.

I'd like to send a shout-out of thanks to my new friend Victor Leach of iDevices. I've said how much I appreciated his app iDevices because it helps you find coordinates on the screen of the iPhone. Well, he put together a little video to help us stitch, and as of this week it was still on SendSpace at

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ax4nqe

Stitching looks a little tricky, so I'm especially grateful to Victor  for putting the video together. We keep playing it over and over at our end. I highly recommend people to check it out if they too are having difficulty combining levels that have been built on multiple computers.

Dare I say it, this next phase will prove interesting and I will likely have much to write about migrating levels onto one computer and putting the levels together in my next entry. "Onward and upward."