A few serious problems that could use your votes/support!

Tokinsom

GM might be 15 years old, but Unity is also around that age. Just because they've been released a long time ago doesn't mean they aren't being updated. If it really was as buggy as bad as you say it is, I doubt it would have that many games done and dusted by that engine. I noted seeing in the showcase that a lot of the people there are actually fairly young. The guys who did Risk of Rain appear to be in their early twenties, and they were in University when they did it, one of the developers look like they're 15 themselves.

As for veterans of the software, you yourself have been here 4 years, Aphrodite has been here 3 years, we have tons of other members who've been here since the beginning and there's still no showcase worthy games... Unless you count Darkbase 01.

It's one thing if you're a long time user of a game development engine that uses code, because you have to learn code and such.

But Construct 2 has a "no code required" thing to it, so people should be popping out games left and right. Instead we have people talking about how they're switching to other engines and how C2 basically slapped them into not earning money.

"C2 has more games than you think"

All I can think of is: Airscape (Not released yet as far as I know), Coin-Op Story (still in alpha), Cosmochoria (no idea of the status), The Next Penelope (who switched) and, Mortar Mellow.

MMF2 (which could totally be misconstrued as a porn genre, now you cannot unsee):

Clickteam made their debut with Klik & Play in 1994, it may be antiquated and poorly designed, but compared to C2 it still more powerful and stable, not to mention it has the native export advantage over C2.

GMS, I'm just going to lay this here from 2012.

Now, you could argue that that was in 2012, and things have changed, C2 has gotten better, yadda yadda.

But then consider this: Things haven't changed enough (or at all) because we still have people saying the exact same thing 3 years later.

Bottom line, with C2 we're still waiting on basic features and bug fixes that aren't going to come as Sccira's moved on to C3.

Exports that we're told are impossible to make and we're still holding our thumbs saying "Let's just wait and see."

That's fine, if you're got time to waste and a steady source of income so that you're not depending on anything.

For the rest of the world, bad bad news.

Maybe Ashley should re-open CC and fix it.

In any case; While other engines such as GMS (formerly GM), Unity and a bunch of others (even Stencyl, Stencyl!!) have improved a lot. They've each improved immensely, GMS broadened with major bug fixes, new features, performance updates, new exporters, better UI. Unity3D added in major support for 2D games, tons of new development features and improvements, new exporters, better UI.

Stencyl I hear went through a major performance improvement.

Meanwhile, C2 fixed a few bugs, brought in others and watched people develop wrappers like it was a Prime Time TV show then shifts blame on said tv show when customers complain of literally everything.

When you buy something, you expect it to work correctly, if not, then you expect to get fixed. You don't expect the seller to tell you [quote:3idrn85a]"Hold on a couple years while these people who have literally nothing to do with me maybe fix what is part of the default features in every other engine. But don't hold your breath if you think they're not going to introduce more bugs!"

I'm not trying to hate on C2 or anything, I wish it was a lot better. The editor is amazing, but that's 90% of what's good about C2, the other 10% is how fast and easy it is to learn and get an example set up. Everything else is bugs and performance issues.

The real reason why other engines such as Unity, GMS, UE(Number), and a bunch of others have showcase games and a good history is because they fix issues instead of hopping onto the next feature like a cocaine crazed magpie seeing something shiny.

IMHO, C2 should only ever be used for browser only games. Not PC, not mobile. Just browser. C2 is effectively the next iteration of Flash but without the scripting. Although Flash could always be used to make a desktop game and performance would be reliable.

Probably made this post way too long.

I agree that when even the html5 export cannot work reliably, we have an issue, also I am slightly worried that chrome will break our content in the future, Sure, we can update our games with a newer C2 if a breaking change happens, but the web will be there for a longer time than C2 itself so at one point, currently they seem to choose the "we ditch useless things", that is also a real issue with native technology it seems as a lot of my games cannot work properly anymore without a patch, and since the web seems to evolve at a faster pace I am unsure about the stability long term wise Across browsers (even with new browsers that may just appear).

you are right, this a problem in all software development. anyone who makes software and/or OSs and/or frameworks update ALL the damn time. you have to support your game after it's done or it will become vaporware... I was on a team that created a decent sized iPhone game back in 2010, we all went on to other projects and the main programmer was too difficult to work with, a year later Apple changed a basic function in Objective C which completely broke our game. The programmer was gone, we had to act quick to pull the game off the app store before people bought it since it didn't work at all.

So the fact that C2 relies on browsers (and its not mutual - meaning browsers don't care about C2 and only see us as a faceless crowd of HTML5 developers), I'm still confident that as long as C2 devs are supporting their games, Ashley and team will find a way to keep things running. Of course Scirra could close it's doors tomorrow and we'd all be screwed. I think that's also a common fear/issue for most users of high-level software.

Look at Fraps.. their last update was in 2013. Win8.1 came out and now Fraps cannot capture monitor without a go between app like Xsplit.

Starring - for what it's worth!!

EDIT: additional content removed in the interest of keeping this on topic after giving UberLou later comment some serious thought....

After all we all love C2 and want these third party issues sorted.....

2. Chrome runs like absolute rubbish below 60fps

For some reason, any time a C2 game dips below 60fps in Chrome, bad things start happening. 59fps is literally unplayable in a fast-paced action game like Airscape.

This may or may not be more of an issue on fillrate intensive games, more testing needs to be done here.

If this issue was fixed it would bring an 100% increase in effective performance in C2 games, as anything from 30-60fps should be perfectly playable.

I think this is relative to the computer. My game is getting quite large. It runs at 60 fps on my desktop. I have an unbound layout and uses a minimap. It keeps track of every object in the "game world". I have spawners constantly spawning objects. I have to cap the spawning at 500. If I run the game layout (not hitting F4) it skips loading my cap code. So in testing I always see my game get taxed and when the object count goes up over 800 the fps dips and 50 fps looks horrible. However, on my ($400 USD) laptop (i5 4GBram) running the normal game it runs at around 35-40 fps but totally plays fine.. you can tell it's not as "tight" as my desktop, but I had a play test at a small festival and no one noticed anything.

But I'd like to offer any support I can to put my vote in to support C2 for desktop games. I've been working on my game for almost 2 years and while I wish I was using Unity, I wouldn't be ANYWHERE as close as I am now to finishing this game. And I wouldn't have grown into gamedev without the success I've had with C2. I've used many game engines, Spring, Torque, Unity, Gamemaker, Unreal, Xcode, and even some engine that came with a book I bought in 1997 called the Black Art of Windows Game Programming. So I very much appreciate C2 and would love to see it support larger games.

I'll have to agree with the general sentiment. I'm sure we all feel screwed simply because we put our bet on this HTML5 tech. On one hand, HTML5's pretty awesome for general... HTML things, but as for gaming, I don't know. Scirra took a gamble HTML5, and so did we for purchasing the software.

My main concern is the publishing and monetization part. Since these are often done at the end of the creation and polishing game creation process, you don't want to realize you're screwed only after investing a lot of time and effort into doing something that will only give you (unworkable?) problems when it comes to showcasing it to the world and earning from it.

Well, does anyone here have experience with HaxeFlixel or Flambe? I'm looking at doing non-retro looking platformer and I see a lot of demos there - usually of the retro look so I'm hoping I'm not limited to doing that stuff at least when it comes to HaxeFlixel.

PS: Here's another thing I don't quite understand with HTML5 games: 60FPS for a game and depending on the jank spike, anything that dips below that becomes unplayable? Seriously? I know that it's 30FPS that's supposedly playable, minimum at a reasonable 24. So how did it come to this?

Nesteris

"As for veterans of the software, you yourself have been here 4 years, Aphrodite has been here 3 years, we have tons of other members who've been here since the beginning and there's still no showcase worthy games... Unless you count Darkbase 01. "

In my case, It was because I had other things to do and no money/budget, not a limitation of the engine itself (I did also tried game maker but could not do anything truly worth it with it in the past), you can say I am more here for the game concepts rather than doing finished game, I will agree that the focus of the community on small mobile games does not help (I even remember someone telling me he would not enjoy the games he did, but as long as they can be sold to a publisher, it is enough).

As for darkbase 01, clearly cannot be called a worthy game, nor a showcase of what C2 can do.

In the end, this squatting of other markets just showcase how much the majority of people do not want to use html5 at all and could do without, and this "marketing mistake" is what ends up being destructive (rather than doing full fledged quality browser games that could be shared easily with one link, with social integration, they try to do native games, but this one has a lot more of thing to consider, namely performances and wrapper quality, also the web evolves at a faster pace, which can be a bummer if you don't get yourself into it), as for browser don't care about games, it is true, not going to lie, but since they are currently trying to release OSes that are meant to use only the Web browser, we still have a hope.

michael, I'm with you 100%. I downloaded 20 hours of Unity videos 3 weeks ago because I think enough is enough. I've already started the slow transition, although I'm hoping that a c2 export becomes commercially viable while I am a Unity noob.

Like you say, though, a functioning export appears unlikely in the next 12 months - at least for fast paced games (which is one reason why Umbra is so slow, I just accepted the c2 limits when u started). I admire the work done on c2 but I am not sure I only want to spend time on making slow non-action puzzle games.

Back on thread - have Google acknowledged a limitation or made any progress with this yet?

Aphrodite

Well I actually have no money/budget to spend on my game, all my assets were ripped from Public Domain or done by artists for free (and I'll still need to switch them out when my game is done).

they are currently trying to release OSes that are meant to use only the Web browser, we still have a hope.

But why stick with hope when there's fully functioning engines overlooking the bench we're all sitting on that's slowly breaking?

Here's a basic summary of the circulation of C2 users:

• Person sees cheap, free of coding game engine
• Person tries it, person likes it
• Person decides to buy it since it's not too expensive, is easy to use and seems to come with a ton of exports for free
• Person starts using said engine, editor and everything seem really good so far
• Person starts running into minor bugs, shrugs it off and makes a work-around
• Person starts running into major bugs, files bug report, gets told it will be fixed, feels good enough
• Person starts to finish game and exports it, is amazed by how incredibly buggy it is, barely working
• If person finishes game, they release to target platform only to have their product kicked off the platform due to using old wrappers because the new wrappers C2 provides break every game forcing users to use old wrappers which cause platforms to block games causing users to use new wrappers - loop
• Person starts using forum more often and thinking about switching engines

Thanks false marketing!

C2 is broken and not very usable for real world scenarios (read: Making a functioning game that can stand against time). It's CC 2.0, now with the same problems that plagued the original CC!

Colludium

Nope, google's stance for everything is "We broke it, you suck it up."

mean really. . . .!! this is ridiculous!!

The concerning thing about all these threads is not just the content, the real worry is the time scale!

Posted 17 Feb 2014: Node-webkit exe freezing randomly Posted 19 Nov 2014: Node-Webkit Jerkiness Posted 26 Nov 2014: R190 - jerking on IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera Posted 17 Jan 2015: NW.js v0.12.0 (Chromium 41) 5th March, Discussion Posted 28 Jan 2015: Native Desktop Exporter for Construct 3 Posted 14 Feb 2015: NW.js v0.12.0 alpha 3 (Chromium 41) 13th Feb, Discussion Posted 14 Apr 2015: Disappointed over bad communications!!! Posted 26 Apr 2015: Export to NW.js problems - Breaks everything that works]

And this isn't even mentioning all the problems and threads related to mobile wrappers and performance.

2. Chrome runs like absolute rubbish below 60fps

For some reason, any time a C2 game dips below 60fps in Chrome, bad things start happening. 59fps is literally unplayable in a fast-paced action game like Airscape.

This may or may not be more of an issue on fillrate intensive games, more testing needs to be done here.

If this issue was fixed it would bring an 100% increase in effective performance in C2 games, as anything from 30-60fps should be perfectly playable.

I played your Public_Performance_Test on my crappy laptop (i5 1.7Ghz, HD Graphics 4400) using Chrome 42.0.23. The fps was 35-45 (never going above 45) and I had absolutely no jank. I could tell it wasn't 60fps, but the game ran smooth. Have you not had this result?

EDIT: let the game test run for 20 mins... FPS 35-38, dt diff:19-38, Max dt: 36-51, dt:27-37 (hard to see), Min dt: 25-29

Nesteris

"But why stick with hope when there's fully functioning engines overlooking the bench we're all sitting on that's slowly breaking?"

For the same reason I would rather do complete full fledged browser games rather than native ones if I had the time, if you do not see said reason, that is ok, however the topic talked about issues with chrome, and so wrapper are related to an extend but not the main thing (which should have been shown as such with C2 in general).

Nesteris

Just out of curiosity, have you created/finished/published a game ? (construct, game maker etc, or code ....)

PS: Here's another thing I don't quite understand with HTML5 games: 60FPS for a game and depending on the jank spike, anything that dips below that becomes unplayable? Seriously? I know that it's 30FPS that's supposedly playable, minimum at a reasonable 24. So how did it come to this?

I have a couple games running ~30 and up on various devices, and game play is good enough.

Perhaps some peoples expectations exceed their own capabilities.

Aphrodite

Obviously you're targeting browsers, that's completely fine. I'm talking about the people who get C2 while trying to make a desktop game.

lennaert

I did two test games in GameMaker Studio while following a couple tutorials, one throw away game in C2 and I'm currently doing my action platformer in C2 which is about 90% done but I had to start again from scratch due to both messy code (but it still works perfectly) and major C2 bugs which a lot of the features (e.g. enemies are doing double to triple damage for absolutely no reason, even in the debugger, there's one instance of each so it's not multiple enemies occupying the same space, and their damage variables are the proper amount, not the amount that's being deducted from player's health).

[quote:42u79yyd]lennaert

I did two test games in GameMaker Studio while following a couple tutorials, one throw away game in C2 and I'm currently doing my action platformer in C2 which is about 90% done but I had to start again from scratch due to both messy code (but it still works perfectly) and major C2 bugs which a lot of the features (e.g. enemies are doing double to triple damage for absolutely no reason, even in the debugger, there's one instance of each so it's not multiple enemies occupying the same space, and their damage variables are the proper amount, not the amount that's being deducted from player's health).

Nesteris

I asked because you have quite some critique about various aspects of construct 2 work flow to produce a game, while in fact, you have about zilch experience.

Even in your post above ... you refer to "major c2 bugs" while in fact I would take on a bet , that:

enemies are doing double to triple damage for absolutely no reason, even in the debugger, there's one instance of each so it's not multiple enemies occupying the same space, and their damage variables are the proper amount, not the amount that's being deducted from player's health).

Are your own game logic's problems ...... which you created ....

I see you outing a lot of criticism on construct 2, and mentioning how you would make a move to another game creation tool and what not ... but I' will take on a second wager that that ship will strand with the same problems ....

Which for me boils down to biting of more then you can chew ....

I feel like a few vocal inexperienced users keep derailing threads bringing a lot of negativity to the forums. This thread should be about making NW\Chrome better.

lennaert

Look at me everyone! Look! Look! I'm an ass!

>

>

> > Are your own game logic's problems ...... which you created ....

> > >

> > > If it was, I would've fixed it. It's a bug because I have two identical projects, one was 'Saved As' another project, so literally everything is the same.

> > > And it doesn't one in one You're obviously a fanboy who's too deep in denial to admit that, by some miracle, C2 could possibly have bugs :O

> > > I also checked your website, "Connect there spheres before the timer runs out"? Oh damn everybody strap in before they fall out of their chair at the originality and and innovation!

> > >

> > > You're just mad I'm poking at C2's bugs and limitations.

> > >

> > > Go be a troll somewhere else, troll.

> > >

> > > UberLou

> > > Good point. My previous post was supposed to be my last one on the thread until mister troll decided to bait.