Construct 3 - many questions (native exporterts)

my current PC is pretty strong

(i4860, 980M, 8gb ram, 120gb ssd + 1tb hdd).

i've also tried it on my older PC which is waaay weaker (and worth maybe 500€ which everyone can buy these days (laptop)), it's specs are - dualcore 2.0ghz Core2Duo, 4gb 800mhz ram, 1GB ati radeon 4650, 500GB drive 5400)

here's a link to my alpha version of the game:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13675221/index.html

try it and see your performance in it. i will post full game once i'm done with it. but i've noticed quite a good improvement in performance while redoing my whole game, because my initial design (this link) was horrible.

megatronx

p.s. loading will take some time.

I would give thanks to all the people that give advices about optimization and personal opinions about game design... but i think that this topic will be resolved easy with a clear answer to the question: Will have construct native exporters in the future?... A clear yes/not reply will be great and I will love very much with tons of my best wishes,hugs and kisses to the construct developer that answer that. (No matters the sense of the answer, really, only need to know clearly). Important to me, and I see that important to others. Please allow answer that.

Thanks people, your software make me happy.

Ashley

If the reason of poor performance in construct made games is in the way people design their games with it, perhaps a better way to find bottlenecks when the game is run in debug mode and some design changes in the editor to discourage people of using poor practices might help the problem.

This is actually something that one of the developers of gdevelop said when we discussed getting a feature similar to one in construct's. He said that in Construct2 there are behaviors/commands that are wasteful and encourage people to do bad unoptimized design for their games when doing the simplest things.

That said you are correct. Construct is way ahead of competing visual programming tools in terms of features and that is exactly because it focuses on html5. It is it's strength and it's weakness.

That said, I have a question about construct3 - an actual question rather than a feature request! How far is the development of the editor? When will you post an update on it's progress? What libraries is it going to be using in order to run on multiple platforms? I am interested because I want to run it on linux. Will there be developer sneak peaks in your blog posts?

So far people have kept complaining about the damn exporters while they could have genuinely been following with excitement the progress of the new editor.

Can anyone show an example where the C2 JS engine is not fast enough???

If you do post below......

I find the debugger provides a lot of useful information, but it's limited because it can't access the chromium engine and report back what's going on there. So when a frame drops, even though fps is a solid 60 and the cpu is at 30% there's no way to know what event caused that particular dropped frame. Checking the javascript console shows that, perhaps, there was a spike in use of the c2 engine, but that's unhelpful information because there's no way to find the cause of a dropped frame.

blurymind asks a good question - how far has the c3 editor progressed? I know it's traditional for devs to throw out a "it'll be ready mid-Dec" guess and then miss that deadline by a country mile, but the absence of any hint is perplexing. Are we discussing how long a piece of string is? When it's done it'll be done...? It would be good to know, although like Jayjay, I don't think I'll be using c2 for anything more than for LD or concept testing in future, because when it comes to export: results are all that matter, and the experience or pleasure of working in the editor are secondary if players see a second rate product.

I would give thanks to all the people that give advices about optimization and personal opinions about game design... but i think that this topic will be resolved easy with a clear answer to the question: Will have construct native exporters in the future?... A clear yes/not reply will be great and I will love very much with tons of my best wishes,hugs and kisses to the construct developer that answer that. (No matters the sense of the answer, really, only need to know clearly). Important to me, and I see that important to others. Please allow answer that.

Thanks people, your software make me happy.

I thought the answer is very clear from the start.

No, it won't. For now, Ashley and co. will continue to focus on HTML5.

my current PC is pretty strong

(i4860, 980M, 8gb ram, 120gb ssd + 1tb hdd).

i've also tried it on my older PC which is waaay weaker (and worth maybe 500€ which everyone can buy these days (laptop)), it's specs are - dualcore 2.0ghz Core2Duo, 4gb 800mhz ram, 1GB ati radeon 4650, 500GB drive 5400)

here's a link to my alpha version of the game:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13675221/index.html

try it and see your performance in it. i will post full game once i'm done with it. but i've noticed quite a good improvement in performance while redoing my whole game, because my initial design (this link) was horrible.

p.s. loading will take some time.

Well done! I loved the animations. Great work!

It doesn't take too long to load here and the game doesn't lag... it's just a little slow in pace.

I don't see jerky frame rate but slow speed in execution. Don't know if it's by design.

Have you tried disabling the water effect?

In my current project I was using the nice Starfield behavior but it got too slow in the letterbox scale that I had to stop using it.

Also do you use functions? I can't recommend them enough.

If it helps, divide most of your game logic in functions that you can call when certain events trigger not every time (every loop of the event editor). It helped speed things a lot for me.

To get back on topic, I'd really love a C3 with more export options even if not official.

There are many things in C2 that puts a smile on my face like its incredible undo feature (that can really undo everything you do in your game), the way you can work with individual layers without affecting everything else and that ELSE in the event editor that really makes events work the way a developer expects. Try to make a toggle button work in Clickteam Fusion 2.5 (although a great software as well) there without a lot of events and you'll see what I mean.

byondisoft - can you just tell me what was your FPS? cpu usage and when do you notice slowdowns ? (they should appear when you get higher weapon level and hit multiple objects with bombs because shitload of particles )

also - this game uses 1366/768 res, and has 5x3 sprites of 256x256 water tiling. under them is 256x256 normal map with bump mapping, so that's pretty heavy on cpus.

and like i said, this was early alpha and the game runs slowly to anyone, even my old pc sometimes slowed down, but my newer version (and soon done) works 10x faster, because i've done shitload of optimization, used way more functions, removed more "every tick" events, and used 1 tiled sprite which should be faster/optimized for tiling water animation. also added option to disable particles and more... you will see soon when i post it

Why would people use cars?

You can just train your body and you will be enough strong to run to different places by yourself.

Also in the future people will create teleports that is why creating cars is a bad idea.

There is no need to create cars.

that logic is flawed paradine.

you didn't include the feeling of driving which some people love. also you didn't include the time needed to develop teleportation - probably won't be around next 100 years maybe more. then all the initial risks and probably deaths by teleportation.

also you didn't include that in 100 years you will be dead when teleportation becomes reality. to achieve progress you go progressively. you know that first car was working on steam? now we're soon entering the era of electric cars, and teleportation probably comes after that.

also if you prefer no cars - then i guess you can travel 500miles on your bycicle or by foot since teleportation doesn't exist.

i'm pretty sure you can't be so strong to run around the world. you're not goku. and you should stop talking nonsense and OFFTOPIC.

that logic is flawed paradine.

you didn't include the feeling of driving which some people love. also you didn't include the time needed to develop teleportation - probably won't be around next 100 years maybe more. then all the initial risks and probably deaths by teleportation.

also you didn't include that in 100 years you will be dead when teleportation becomes reality. to achieve progress you go progressively. you know that first car was working on steam? now we're soon entering the era of electric cars, and teleportation probably comes after that.

also if you prefer no cars - then i guess you can travel 500miles on your bycicle or by foot since teleportation doesn't exist.

i'm pretty sure you can't be so strong to run around the world. you're not goku. and you should stop talking nonsense and OFFTOPIC.

My post about the cars was a metaphor, I used it to show you, that arguments against native exporters are as nonsense as arguments against cars.

The only c2 weakness in is performance and not platform direct connection and coding.

so many c2 users leave c2 just because of this 2 and we all know that

console

I think it is likely that the Xbox One update to Windows 10 will make it possible to publish HTML5 games to Xbox One, but we are holding off on making official announcements about that until we know for sure.

it could also be described as a top-down FZERO, which the SNES could handle

Obligitory "my SNES could run this", obligitory reminder that as far as I can find the highest resolution mode of the SNES was 512x239 8bpp which is 122kb per layer vs. a modern 32-bit 1080p game which is 8mb per layer or about 68x more bandwidth. Assuming you have the background and four own-texture layers, that's 340x as much bandwidth, not including higher-resolution textures, plus rotation and scaling, plus no sprites-per-line restrictions, plus transparency and alpha blending, etc.

Construct 2 games fail hard on Mac OSX and Linux with games over 500MB, and most of that size is soundtracks.

Maybe that's a NW.js issue, but it's surely solvable. I know that recently there were bugs that combined with the slow NW.js release cycle has made for a lot of waiting, but I think it is pretty clear that NW.js should soon be back to working effectively, and that's a far more sensible option than burdening ourselves with a multi-year fork of our engine.

it's roughly a 2.4GHz dual-core Intel CPU with Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU. Do you use a device with these specs when you test the examples people send?

Yes! And the bottleneck on that kind of device is the fillrate on the weak Intel GPU. Which is a hardware limit. Which means making a native engine will be no faster at all. So that's actually a pretty good example of why making a native exporter is completely futile for improving performance on that kind of device: WebGL is basically already performing identically to a native app in that case. Intel CPUs are pretty strong even on low-end models, meaning the overhead of Javascript is really not an issue. The GPU fillrate is the real issue. Intel GPUs really suck. That's not our fault, or HTML5's fault, or Chrome's fault. It's just crappy hardware.

I really think some people have the impression that if we write a native exporter, hardware specs will magically increase.

here's a link to my alpha version of the game:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13675221/index.html

try it and see your performance in it. i will post full game once i'm done with it. but i've noticed quite a good improvement in performance while redoing my whole game, because my initial design (this link) was horrible.

Wow, nice game. How did you do the ship's turning animation? Did you use Q3D?

I tested your game on 3 computers using Chrome. Here are the results:

Windows 10

• i7 with AMD R9 270X: 60FPS (not suprising)
• i3-3110m with Intel HD 4000 : 60-57 FPS

Windows 8.1:

• Core2Duo with Intel 4th series graphics (pretty old CPU/GPU): 26-35 FPS

I really think some people have the impression that if we write a native exporter, hardware specs will magically increase.

Ashley please just make one game with unity and then you see native performance is really different and so much better !