Addon SDK v2

Folks, please remember the goal here is to stop a regular occurence of customer projects being ruined by permanently broken and unmaintained addons.

Why wait for a hypothetical disaster later when we can enjoy a catastrophe right now

Because unless we remove it, people will just carry on using it, and the disasters will still happen

Well if there is a clear warning, the user would know they're taking the responsibility, if they complain to you, you could just copy paste the link to the documentation page telling "If you use a Addon SDK 1 addon, it could be broken by accident and we won't provide support". You could make it totally inaccessible for child/student by restricting Education Licence and hide the SDK 1 compatibility behind the hidden developer mode setting, so only the advanced users that actually want/need to extend the engine would do it.

Before the warning was adressed to addon developers, but now the warning would be addressed to users of the addons, which is far better.

Also hiding risky features behind a Developer Mode is an "industry standard" everyone understands.

There is no valid reason benefiting any C3 user to justify the fact to permentently remove so much possibilities and control over our own work, the only person on earth that think they might benefit from this situation is you. And we're several to think you're actually wrong and you're hurting your product/community by doing so, this just is a lose-lose situation while every single competitor out there understands how a prolific 3rd party dev community is a win-win scenario.

Disasters have happened, are happening, and will continue to get worse.

I get that "disasters have happened" at the C2 era or 5+ years ago when everything was different.

But the "disasters ARE happening" is just false, since worker mode support introduction (4-5 years ago) that involved some changes on how addons should be made, the vast majority of addons made never broke. Also the very few time there was disruptive change like that, there were clear benefits for all users in the balance. (it is the opposite here, you dedicate months/years of work to LOCK the engine instead of enhancing it and acting on features requested for years)

I'm not sure if there is a single Construct 3 addon made over the past 6 years that would be impossible to fix in the current version thanks to SDK1 even if it broke 3 years ago. Currently there is always a workaround, or a simple fix to find. SDK2 is the guarantee there would be no workaround at all in a tremendous amount of situations

Construct 3 runtime codebase never changed on many aspects, because all vanilla Plugins and Behaviors (or any other features) are relying on it and you've always been reluctant to make even the tiniest change to those official Addons to make sure they still behave exactly the same. (so the reason it's so stable never was to avoid breaking 3rd party addons but to make sure games using official addons still do the exact same thing)

Even when something changes (if it ever changes), it's very quick and easy to fix, like just renaming a method or rewriting 1 or 2 lines do the trick, because, to keep working, the C3 codebase still need in some way the same feature we were accessing.

It's nothing like having to rewrite EVERY addon from scratch with a 50% chance it won't ever be portable at all.

For a customer (all) it mainly reduces Construct's value tremendously. Which i highly doubt will be reflected in the pricing.

Maybe it's supposed to shock to pressure devs to update their addons to sdk v2, and eventually we get some kind of compromise. But wasn't there supposed to be some kind of collaboration with our addon devs to prevent what's currently happening?

Unfortunately is just driving off addon devs and on top damages the product and Scirra's reputation as a whole.

I sincerely hope there's a big turnaround in how this is going to proceed before the next stable release.

This already is a disaster.

I have marked my none effect addons as deprecated now as I am not sure I'll port them. They are open source though and it should be straight forward for anyone to port them if your project relies on any of the addons.

Why Construc 3 mus be updatet to SDK 2, Ashley do both versions C3 with sdk 1 and c3 with sdk 2 (similiar as softwares have x86 and x64 versions.) Bugfixes and newest updates for new relases should have in both versions

I'll advise my clients and the users of my addons to keep using the last version supporting SDK 1 so i'll still be able to help them to achieve their vision and to develop powerful tools for them.

The addons i made for private use + all the addons the community made are worth about 4-5 years of vanilla update at the pace features targeting actual gamedev are pushed. (Not even counting all the very specific addons I made to target my own production needs, and not counting services integration like Chadori addons, just speaking about stuff that feels Vanilla here).

=> The tradeoff is not worth it : even if some top suggestions requested for many years like Hierarchy View, Better 3D or Family Inheritance gets added in the upcoming years - which i doubt, it would still not worth dropping the modularity/flexibility Addon SDK1 allows, all the custom features already made by 3rd party devs and the fact I know i can implement almost anything I want when i need it.

Overall it really hurts my faith in the engine, as such unilateral decisions hurting gamedevs subscribers keeps happening again and again and i'm not confortable with the feeling i don't have any ownership over my own work, so i'll keep digging in the free Open Source alternatives, made by gamedevs for gamedevs, that are growing at light speed in term of popularity/features/resources such as Godot (for full desktop/console/mobile games) and GDevelop (for little no-code/web games). It's disheartening but it just feels too risky to bet long term in C3.

Coincidential timing but TODAY, Godot just announced big improvements coming for their Web export in the upcoming 4.3 and 4.4 releases. Given the ease of use of GDscript, the incredibly prolific content creator/addon dev community in Godot, and the fact every single addition is targeting actual gamedevs and adressing their actual issues (Open Source)...

web export is one of the last main competitive advantage i find when using C3 (especially if C3 addons allowing to overcome limitations are all about to be broken and addondev is about to become 10x more restrictive) and it looks like that C3 web export advantage won't last very long.

I'm so so muddled it stings.

I know I'm just a basic game dev and moving at a snails pace, but I have always been so proud and eager to put the Construct logo at the intro of my game and such (obv asking Scirra first but I'm just a happy customer so it's a priority to me).

I still have a strong loyalty and I adore Scirra and Construct, smart people that took a huge "gamble" and was 100% on point with said gamble. But, this feels different compared to past drama...

If this change literally does nothing to benefit addon devs or users, creates work for addon devs with no gain, and a bunch of addons will die due to impossibility or jaded addon devs, then it's really hard to empathise with Scirra.

Scirra getting angry support emails is the key thing to empathise with.

So 2 years from now, Scirra will still get angry users even if it's a chrome/apple/nwjs/webview issue, they're angry at Scirra which we all know is incorrect since it's out of Scirra's hands. If it's educational sector, at least can be formal and have policies for Scirra to protect themselves (whereas game devs are just ruthless as we know).

So angry emails will still exist, just 1 type of them is eliminated, at a massive cost to freedom and it looks like alienating some key members of the C3 community.

And again, the only reason I care, even though I don't know anything about addon development, is because I care about the game I envision. It's painful when there's a feature just barely out of reach, like I started using the new Dynamic animations, but there's a few missing things that I only discovered when half-way implementing a new system. I know there's high chance I can ask addon dev for help, but low chance to get upvotes on suggestions platform to maybe be accepted/rejected.

Edit: worth noting, I empathise with the warning that was always displayed about undocumented stuff, but I guess I'm not as attracted to addons that automate stuff that can be done via events (that's the fun part I wanna work on myself!), I like the addons that fill in a small gap, fix a small thing, enable a small feature. They're often tiny things but matter when trying to craft your game exactly how you envision, or utilise the features C3 offers to it's full extent.

Ashley I wonder if you've discussed this with Chadori, Mikal and other big addon makers? Will you provide them support, ensure that their addons get converted before the deadline?

C3 really lacks monetization features (to put it lightly), especially on mobile. Mobile developers fully rely on 3rd party monetization addons. You can't just brush them off and say "you knew the risks, you had plenty of time to contact the addon developer etc."

I wonder if you've discussed this with Chadori, Mikal and other big addon makers? Will you provide them with support, ensure that their addons get converted before the deadline?

In my case the answer is no, the only response so far has been to deny a suggestion request for SDK V2 to support the ProUI addon and then no further response after I tried to compromise and be more specific in regard to the response and look for help for another solution. I just got a good helpful response and I appreciate it!

I hope this changes collaboration continues in the near future. I feel like it has been more collaborative in the past w.r.t. SDK support requests and hope that returns.

I mentioned this before, but another proposal, is to continue with SDK V2, etc. for the mainline C3. Add a license for full C3 source availability / no encapsulation / obfuscation in runtime or editor as is the general practice with game engines. The typical user which is the one that will complain about broken addons will not pay for the extra license. The extra license can outline the risk and requirements for the user. This license will allow users to work with C3 in advanced way directly or with advanced addons. The advanced addons will only be able to be installed in the advanced version of C3.

Other engines also have a much more extensive feature set and API (Unreal, Unity, Godot) for both general scripting and plugins, if C3 was at a similar level for SDK V2, it would be more acceptable, since it doesn't I would suggest that C3 takes a different approach for more advanced users.