New way to make iOS/Android games (for smarties)

http://appmobi.com/opensource/

Check out "DirectCanvas" and "DirectSound."

I'm confident that these could be rolled into a proper iOS/Android App exporter for Construct, OR if someone wants to do it now, supposedly it's only a matter of changing "canvas" to "AppMobi.Canvas" in your script file to get graphics working (haven't learned about sound yet). I'm anxious to see someone try it. I would dig in but I'm away from my Windows PC right now so I can't use Construct.

I hope that Ashley and the rest of the devs seriously consider this!

thanks for the link

how i create game for android? can you direct me on right way? my english is not very well

I've seen this and it looks very interesting, but there are two problems - there's such little documentation I can't see any obvious way to actually use it, and it seems to require you set up a full blown XCode development system on a Mac. The reason I like PhoneGap so much is the build system is so simple. Without PhoneGap build, to make an iOS app you need to own a Mac, download XCode, download a bunch of SDKs, install everything and run the compiler. The whole system is designed for programmers. Same story for Android: you need to download hundreds of megabytes of the Eclipse IDE, Android SDK, configure the compiler correctly, and on and on. I did it myself and it was a massive headache, and I'm a programmer! And again for Symbian, and again for all the others. Compare that to PhoneGap Build: upload, wait a moment, done. If we tell people to get these development systems we're also obliged to help them get it working, which is really complicated, slow and difficult. So I see PhoneGap as being much more suitable for the non-technical easyness of Construct 2. AppMobi don't appear to have a similar online build service.

So PhoneGap is OK but not great - iOS 5 performance is OK for simple games and Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) should be similar, but it's still not quite there. I'm hoping for WebGL to be supported on phones soon. Our runtime already supports it and that should enable close-to-native performance in HTML5.

Uhm... interesting. I will see a little bit.

It looks like phonegap is a clear winner. I just hope their pricing isn't ridiculous when they launch.

While Phonegap is easy to use in comparison, it does nothing to improve performance for the HTML5 canvas, which still is very bad on many mobile devices. And if my understanding is correct, the appmobi thing does some of its own magic to speed things up considerably.

If that is true at all, I do still think that appmobi would be a very interesting option to explore. Although one might have to overcome the obstacle of lacking documentation.

Existing iOS phones will probably not support WebGL, and PhoneGap only supports one sound at a time. This is simply unacceptable and is not likely to change.

Yes, the AppMobi system (which is based on PhoneGap) requires the iOS/Android SDK. But have you read the directions? Both of the SDKs are free, and the system builds directly from a set of HTML and JS files, just like PhoneGap. It's basically drag-and-drop, after the code part is exported properly (as it would be from a Construct exporter).

This would give us working apps now without having to wait for WebGL and sound support which will probably never come. The steps to turn it into an iOS app are literally drag-and-drop if the code is correct.

Once you go GPU, you can't go back. +1 for this approach rather than relying on the mobile browsers implementations to deliver GPU accelleration.

Well, nothings stopping anyone giving AppMobi a go - you can probably drop in an exported Construct 2 project and try building that. Would love to hear anyone's feedback on it, but I don't think it will work for the majority of C2 users until they have a Build system comparable to PhoneGap.

It would be awesome if Construct could export directly to iOS and other mobile devices in the near future. Construct is just so simple to use compared to programs like Game Maker (they will soon be releasing a version which will allow direct iOS export, hope Construct can beat them to it.)   <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />