Deprecated features

[brisdaz]

Has the find a friend in iOS game centre feature been deprecated for iOS? Also voice chat has been deprecated as well?

Is there a change log somewhere besides the limited one in the app?

[eddybox]

Wow, brisdaz, you're amazingly perceptive! Yes, both those features were removed over the years.

Friend invitations never worked very well, and when Apple seemingly all-but-abandoned Game Center about 10 years ago, and deprecated a bunch of API features, we cut it. (Along with all social networking features.)

Similar story with voice-chat. It simply stopped working, and started causing all sorts of crazy performance and logging issues. I posted about it to Apple's developer forums, and logged a bug report – but no help there, so I cut it.

Let's see, what else has changed... (some of this stuff is mentioned in the in-game news.)

- I added background multiplayer matchmaking so you can play single-player levels while waiting.
- I added (bluetooth) game controller support. You can play on the Vision Pro this way, as well as touch-devices of course.
- Some higher resolution art assets.
- Added Portuguese and Korean translations.
- As you noticed, I made both versions ("Osmos" and "Osmos for iPad") Universal apps. It just seemed ridiculous in this day and age to have separate apps. I wish Apple provided a way to merge SKUs, since it's a bit confusing now having two apps that are essentially identical, but I also wanted to make sure people who had purchased either version got to keep it, so I've left them both on the store.
- You can now quickly tap past the splash screens.
- There was built-in screen-recording for a while, but since it's built into the OS these days, I removed it.
- Miscellaneous fixes.

That takes us back about 7-8 years!

Cheers,
Eddy

[brisdaz]

How hard would it be to add the voice chat feature back in or link in the help pages to a communications app/media such as Discord which has built-in voice chat especially designed for gamers?

I've suggested elsewhere to link to this forum from the multiplayer help page.

[eddybox]

I spent a decent amount of time troubleshooting the voice chat feature back in the day, and couldn't get it to work properly. And at this point that code is pretty old and crufty. But I like the idea of adding a link behind that (?) button. I'll reply further on that other thread...