Native Desktop Exporter for Construct 3

— Games Do you have a game on Steam made in C2? Do you have customers e-mailing and commenting and posting reviews of stuttering and glitches that are out of your control? You keep showing up to promote how amazing C2 is to people who already know that C2 itself is an amazing editor. I've been using tools like it since Klik 'N Play, TGF, MMF, Construct Classic, and so on, and this is definitely the next step in their evolution.

But stop pretending that we can't complain just because the adverts don't define the words "professional", "easy", and "powerful". Those words have to mean something or otherwise my definition of a great game will have to be Flappy Bird, Candy Crush Saga, and Bejewelled.

As I said a few times, I bought C2 (and later bought the business upgrade) under the belief that it would surpass CC performance, and even that at some point in the past year it already had (based on the blog post), but after finally making a large game it has shown not to be the case. The demo doesn't let you get to the game size of a full commercial title like The Next Penelope (or the game Chris and I made, Insanity's Blade, a 500MB game inspired by 80's arcade games like GnG), and by that time it's too late to be able to isolate single issues (they all work together to drain the FPS), let alone for Scirra to wade through thousands of events, and tonnes of layouts and objects.

HTML5 has improved with the help of some WEBGL and asm.js/emscripten, so there are hopes for improved performance in future builds, but it definitely isn't a solidified platform yet so who knows what will come with changes to HTML5 itself (in 5.1 and 5.2 updates). Again, this isn't about native anymore, but about some sort of system where performance can be less of a mixed bag, especially across similar machines that should (in theory) be faster than my own development machine (but still have slowdown/issues), and in downgrading to Node-Webkit 10.5 it re-introduced audio bugs to make up for huge jank/jitter bugs.

I think lots of users have unrealistic expectations ; not specifically about C2, but regarding software development in general, which includes the most regular complaints that are performance and cross-platform.

From my point of view, the only claim made by Scirra about C2 that could be argued is the "no programming required" ; while there is no actual programming, writing "good" logic with event sheets does require a "programmer" approach and thinking. Plus, understanding more of the underlying technical details helps with creating efficient behaviours. And I can see why people with no programming background might be frustrated when a "naive" logic performs badly in terms of performance, but that's just a normal limitation of the tool. Everything else is pretty much accurate.

High-level tools like C2 improve the productivity of application and game development, but it will never makes things as complex as cross-platform deployment trivial and smoothless. Each engine or framework has its limitations, and there's a balance to find between functionalities, flexibility and ease-of-use.

C2 does support multiple platforms to a reasonable level, and does a very decent job considering the technical direction. Anyone expecting significantly better while maintaining the simplicity and the low price tag is badly mistaken and can only be disappointed. People switching to other engines/tools will inevitably find other limitations, and potentially much steeper learning curves.

Refeuh It seems like you assume that the people using C2 can't code, and that's why they demand so much of C2. Again, look at performance in CC on Windows, that's all I want, the cross-platform part is something that is really out of Scirra's control when it comes to consoles or what mobile device specs will be (plus, I do code, and have been programming for years in different languages, C2 is just such a great way to make 2D games that all it needs is some improvements to the runtime side to be perfect for desktop)

Jayjay I am not assuming that people cannot code, I am just giving an example of dubious advertisement claim ("no programming required") ; this example is supported by these forums, where every body can see various users confused by certain functionalities or development pitfalls. As for as I am concerned, this claim "no programming required" is the only one I'm not entirely comfortable with because I believe it is partially misleading. And it is my opinion that C2 supports every other advertised functionality, including cross-platform deployment, to decent standards.

This does not contradict your statements and I am not questioning your experience with C2.

Refeuh Ah, okay. Well, I agree that it's a tricky phrase they use, I think it does encourage people who think programming is like assembly/machine code to give C2 a try, but it would be nice if they could later be told/shown that they're using a lot of similar concepts to traditional programming after they get the hang of the event system

Jayjay indeed, the logic between even sheets and gameplay programming is very similar. Btw, if you're having performance issues and you have a programming background (which ensures you avoided the traditional perf killers and naive behaviours), I believe Ashley has been after tangible examples of such problems. I'm sure he'd be happy to help investigate, as this could identify actual improvements to be made to C2 ; from what I see/read, most of the time bad performance is explained by terrible logic, broken wrappers, broken drivers, or low spec device, which are all beyond the scope of C2. Anything that shows a flaw in the tool itself would be useful, I think

Lets get things straight. In C2 some things are stupid easy, and some things are stupid hard.

Everything you do in code is going to be stupid hard, especially if you export to anything other than HTML5.

So, should Scirra stop even trying to allow for wrappers, and concentrate on HTML5? That in and of itself is hard enough to get right what with all the different browser vendors.

So they can do things easy, or they can do things real easy, its up to you.

So, should Scirra stop even trying to allow for wrappers, and concentrate on HTML5?

Perhaps that is what should be done, but maybe also C3 could include something of an SDK or guide for instead allowing others to develop exporters that will have to match/work with the way Construct does things (rather than Construct trying to export to the specific wrappers).

That way the third party devs/plugins come to (or from) the community which can leave Scirra to focus on just the web platform, and may even encourage competition in the market if commercial exporters are developed.

Granted, that's still way easier to say than to do of course, and might only work for wrapper-based exports in general.

I was interested in Native before NW. Now that Adventures of DaKoo is Greenlit, I'm more interested in time saving features. Things that would make it easy to engage the audience at the same time does not take time to implement.

I might want Native still to some degree, but some things just aren't going to happen. That said what CAN be done to make C3 a worthy upgrade? I would love to see the process of making and sharing levels for my games easy for users, like a pre built level editor template is an example.

For now consoles are out and that is a shame. Perhaps Paper2d is an option for what little I have read on it. I wonder if this is the future of 2d development anyway, considering it's backed by Epic and the price is so low.

What happens to Construct 2 and 3 when HTML6 comes out?

What happens to Construct 2 and 3 when HTML6 comes out?

The thing with HTML is that it's really very very likely that it's going to be fully backwards compatible with just forwards compatibility being a question - which can then quite likely be solved with plugins.

Jayjay

Nesteris

jayderyu

Juryiel

summing up "make advanced games", "true multiplatform support", "reliable":

2011: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... ?id=108284

2014: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... ?id=422000

it seems that time passed,

JavaScript got better (and CPUs got stronger),

but we are still in the same place: begging 3rd party companies for fixing their bugs,

and it will be even more fun with auto-updating WebView on Android 5.0+ devices.

And if Google cares so much about HTML5 and HTML5 games, then why there is no someone from Chromium team on Scirra forum? It's the most popular HTML5 game creator as far as I know...

[quote:33j2cqoy]we are still in the same place: begging 3rd party companies for fixing their bugs

This is also true for drivers, operating systems, etc. and these affect all the tools/engines on all the platforms. Not using this as an excuse, but that's the current state of things : it is very common for developers to use workarounds, undocumented features, and black voodoo magic fixes, to circumvent all kinds of issues (hardware issues, driver issues, OS issues, etc.) on many very popular platforms.

I understand this is far from ideal, but in reality things are never as smooth as we'd like ; in my opinion it's just something to accept and compose with, as we'll never have a perfectly stable deployment environment.

Jayjay: You can complain, but complain about the right things! C2 is a mature and professional product for an html5 engine! And you can make advanced games with it. Scrirra did not lie about this. But what you must get in your head is that you can not compare this engine with for example a C++/OpenGl Engine. The problem is the wrong expectation of people, not the engine itself.

Waiting for a bug fix is more sensible than starting a huge software engineering project to work around it. Google do respond to bugs - sometimes it takes a while - but they are far more communicative than driver vendors, and then even if they fix it, the update may only be distributed to a fraction users worldwide, due to their policy of dropping support for driver updates for old hardware after a few years.

I do understand it is hard to hear as a customer, but waiting for improvements does work. Around 2011 when everyone was exasperatedly telling us what were we thinking, we should make a Flash exporter, and I still argued then that the direction things are going in is more important than the specifics of the situation right now. Where are those "you must make a Flash exporter" people now?

I guess if you absolutely insist on the necessity of a native exporter, then maybe there are other tools out there which can provide that for you. But I do think that would be somewhat premature at this stage if your main concern is the status of v-sync quality in Chrome - it's probably not going to stay the same forever.