Time to move forward?

Maybe this is an issue of you get what you pay for? It seems you have advanced to the point where you'll need more robust development kit and in that case it really is time to move on, truthfully.

Maybe so, maybe so. But you can imagine my frustration, when you have in your hands almost all but still nothing. Almost perfect software but not quite. It's almost Christmas, but not quite. And only what you hear from Ashley is "this is not my fault," "wait, this will be corrected in the future" "In the future everything is better" "I can not reproduce this bug (after 15+ people saying how its can reproduce)". I've been waiting 2,5 years. Can you feel this frustration? I want to cry.

In the end, even if you build a flawlessly working bike, a pothole can wreck you.

Heh, you're absolutely right.

It's frustrating to be blamed for bugs in other people's software, and that specific iOS audio issue you referenced is the latest and strongest example of this.

I am almost certain the bug is in either Safari or the iOS operating system In this case, it doesn't matter what tool you use: anything at all that runs in Safari will be affected by the same bug. So I guess you can choose a different tool if you like, but you could easily run in to the same bug again, because the problem is in Safari or iOS, not Construct 2.

I didn't even fix the bug, so I can't even take credit for that. It's impossible for us to fix problems in Apple's own software. All I did was found a crazy hack that seemed to work around the bug. So the bug is still there and Apple still need to fix it. Personally I regard this kind of hacking-around-bugs as beyond the call of duty - I'm sure there are companies out there who'd just say "we've reported it to Apple, hopefully iOS 10 fixes it" - but we go beyond that and try to work around (emphasis on work around - not fix) defects in other software we rely on where it's feasible to do so. Note it is not always feasible to do so. The fact this particular iOS bug is worked around pretty much amounts to luck.

Usually someone then blames us for relying on certain tools or libraries which have bugs, but all software has bugs. It's naive to think that if we switch to some other library or framework, everything will suddenly work perfectly. Common suggestions are things like: why not use Haxe? It could have bugs, and we could equally be screwed by its bugs. Why not use {insert library here}? If it's not developed by companies as large as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, it's probably even less reliable. Why not write native code? Operating systems have bugs, and graphics drivers have severe bugs - we have direct experience of that, and they are often far worse than the kind of issue we just dealt with on iOS. They tend to be of the class "all devices with this GPU crash on startup", and there is no diagnostic information whatsoever. In the past we've literally resorted to desperately guessing solutions over a period of days, then ultimately given up. That actually happened with the Construct 2 editor in the early days (it uses OpenGL to render the layout view). Eventually months later we got a tip out of the blue, and we finally managed to work around it. Hardly a reliable approach, but there's little else we can do when it's not our code that's broken.

I know this is super frustrating and when your games aren't working, you naturally look to us for support. However the nature of software development is everything - all platforms, frameworks, libraries - depend on a huge amount of third party code, and that code is as imperfect as everything else. It's implausible to expect any software company at all to magically fix everyone else's code. It affects everyone, regardless of their technology choices.

FWIW Scirra has been larger than just me for a while now. Check the team page. We should be growing again soon as well.

its not other people software it's your engine which is not fully capable , so face it and admit it

c2 worst problem is html5, if it was native there was no problem ! or if there was then we could fix it.

but , i like c2

People do complain about products their bought: sometimes their complains are legit, and sometimes they are not. But I have to agree with others, that while promoting c2 having exporters options is cool and all, having them constantly producing issues is not. It is a gray zone somewhat in terms of legality, since you technically can do all those things, means, export. From customers point of vie tough, having issues caused by those 3rd party programs is really a massive bummer. Development is hard process of balancing between pleasure and frustration, but from personal standpoint, issues that are caused by 3rd party stuff are simultaneously enraging and disheartening. And if I'd be a company who's making software, I'd look for solution to it myself, to give customers best ux possible. Got to note Im not implying that Ashley is not working hard, because he is and is doing great job. But sometimes I can see that sometimes choices he's making don't seam like they are in best interest of the end product, by which I mean a finished game, not a prototype of something. And I'm not accusing him of any bad intentions, however me and may others just'd like to show things in a bit different light then to how things are now. For us the end product, our end product is most important of all, and we can ignore some minor inconveniences in the editor etc, but game's got to work 100% fine, especially that none of us is making The Witcher or Elder Scrolls here, or even Doom. And to finish this, my current problem with nwjs, and early on in development, is that at some resolutions ( or in other words window size ) some objects (sprites) are displaying with a glitch that looks like there is extra pixel or two bar to the side or top, while not on others, even thought they might be same objects.

> Construct 3 is what we need to have hope for in future terms.

> ...

> Is C2 gonna change into the engine that you envision? Probably not, because Scirra is now more focused on C3 and perhaps that will be the engine that you envision.

> ...

> I think that Construct 3 is what will move Scirra forward.

>

> and we are very anxiously awaiting C3.

>

You both know that C3 is planning on using the exact same HTML5 export/runtime as C2 right?

> BTW the stated goal of C3 is to rebuild the editor and keep the same runtime, so this is not really the kind of thing we intend to change anyway in the scope of that project.

>

Source: will-the-top-level-design-be-removed-in-c3_p980758?#p980758

The only thing you can actually anticipate for is devices, browsers, and NodeJS to all catch up to the "standard" of HTML5...which is also the same dragon C2 users have been chasing since the first betas came out in 2011.

Granted, it's getting better slowly but surely. However, if you're making and releasing games *now* you would hope that your game works the same across all of your customers devices right? And it doesn't, it's all over the map with desktop export, mobile, and even web browsers still have major differences between them (Chrome goes through cycles of breaking-changes and patches, etc).

Don't forget that you are a customer of Construct 2 meaning you are also buying a product which is supposed to do what it says on the box, so when it tells you that you can export to "Windows, Mac, and Linux" using a Node-Webkit wrapper ( https://www.scirra.com/construct2#multi ) and then your game fails to run on the "Mac and Linux" parts, it is not acceptable! and telling us to "just wait for it to improve/get fixed" is also not a valid response!

I don't care if it's Node-Webkit that is broken, I paid Scirra for a tool that they say will work on Mac and Linux, and it doesn't for my (commercial) game. It barely even runs the same/without glitches across my Steam customers' computers too, and they have hardware that might be way better than mine or the exact same specs, it's random and *my* customers do not accept "Please wait for approximately 2 years for NodeJS to improve the export by using the latest Chrome...which will also disable Steam Achievements until Greenworks is updated, and introduce random new bugs because Chrome was updated".

Ashley has done wonders with CC and C2, and has made an awesome tool for "learning game development" and "making small games for mobile and web" with a great editor and really cool way of visually coding games, but for Construct to really move forward into the status that the "more professional" game development tools have it needs a stronger export option. I don't care if that means exporting to a format that can be imported by other engines, but the native export to console and desktop is looking like the absolute minimum export options that commercial game devs need to grow. (And no, WiiU doesn't count, because it doesn't support WebGL).

Yeah, I kinda forgot about that. Thank you for reminding me.

With that reminder. Then what's wrong with adding in Native Exportation options? If it's a change of the editor, and not the entire, then shouldn't they be also working on Native Exports? I know it's a long process, since Ashley has stated it many times but if C3 is gonna take a long time to release, do you guys think that that's what they're working on?

To add some clarity. iOS9 introduced some major audio bugs that caused games from 2K to be removed from the store, games like Bioshock, which are huge AAA titles.

Many other games were affected, such as Telltale games!

iOS iterations are to be frank, utterly stupid, in how their updates will BREAK functionality and BREAK compatibility with coding that worked fine.

Now, this affects other games and engines.

But C2 is particularly vulnerable to these changes because it relies on browsers on top of the usual OS/drivers. There's an additional layer of "stupid", if you will, basically increasing the odds of something breaking.

As long as it remains a HTML5 engine, this will always be the major negative of C2 and C3. So use it, but you have to accept that it's going to remain on the fringe or "beta" mode for awhile yet.

This is the price we pay for having a great and intuitive game engine. If you aren't happy with that, then move on.

There's a big tension around recently due to many recent bugs and old problems/topics as well. I am also frustrated as I'm trying to release my Android app which is finished, but both CocoonIO an IntelXDK have some unacceptable issues now.

Believe me I had moments I want to cry as well... but if you calm down and look at the big picture, then after all it's not C2 which is a problem. It is true that Ashley could have made better decisions sometime as megatronx mentioned, but well... that's another story.

Regarding that C2 is a "product which is supposed to do what it says on the box" I must disagree a bit. Software is not a bike. You can say that about an easy accountant software which needs just one update a year to adjust new tax rules, but not about an engine which is made to make other software. Thinking this ways you should have the version of C2 which you downloaded as first, and use only wrappers and everything around with the version which was available the time you downloaded that first C2. Then it would be what was on the box (at that time).

But we need/want more all the time right? This technology is extremely rapid. New things come out and we want them in C2, so we have updates and what goes after - issues which need some fix.

Let's be honest... even Microsoft and Googe make soft mistakes and they have a series of quality checks.

After all I have really mixed feelings, cause from one side I do understand the software production system and it flaws. But from another I am also tired of "hoping" that "they" will fix "it" soon.

I wouldn't judge anyone for dropping C2. I know sometimes frustration reaches the limit and you simply say "ahh f*** it!". Moving to Unity or something like that would probably give you better performance and feeling of stability, but surely development won't be that fun as with C2.

Personally I told a friend today that this is my second and last mobile game with C2. I'll be following IntelXDK and CocoonIO and wait for the good times (I'm sure they will come within maximum 2 years). But I'm absolutely not leaving C2. Let's face it. It is the best HTML5 game engine in the world.

P.S. Wanted to write some short thoughts just to follow this subject, but as usually I wrote ten times more than I planned (laughter through tears)

I see Ashley, I see… What about C2/C3 own exporters? I guess you understand that the problems associated often do just that? What's more third-party variables, the greater the problems. We could have only C2 problems and publishing platform (in this case iOS) problems. Now we have Ludei and Intel problems as well. Don't answer on this. I know your opinion about exporters. You just say that you don't have time for it.

I've seen him say about native exporters pretty much what he just said to you in this thread: They wouldn't necessarily fix the problems people assume they would because they would still be relying on external sources (for example, driver makers).

Regarding that C2 is a "product which is supposed to do what it says on the box" I must disagree a bit. Software is not a bike. You can say that about an easy accountant software which needs just one update a year to adjust new tax rules, but not about an engine which is made to make other software. Thinking this ways you should have the version of C2 which you downloaded as first, and use only wrappers and everything around with the version which was available the time you downloaded that first C2. Then it would be what was on the box (at that time).

Perhaps some more background to why I feel C2 doesn't live up to its promise would help.

As a Construct Classic user, I had been fine with the issues of the native engine crashing and editor bugs, because I had understood it was a project made open source by students in their spare time. It still produced amazing Windows games in both 2D and 2.5D that worked excellently (rarely crashing during runtime) on then-average (today low-end and ancient) DirectX 9 hardware, and even 3D ones if you knew the math.

When Construct 2 was in early development there was a great deal of excitement: Scirra was going to make a serious go of it/a professional game dev tool and an improvement to CC starting all over from scratch.

Around this time we were also told "desktop export would be a given", which many assumed to mean native export, and other ideas were being put out by Scirra (like having multiple exporter options rather than just the HTML5+Wrappers option. That's why the html5 engine is inside a folder called "exporters" eg: C:\Program Files\Construct 2\exporters\html5). Information about that is all here on the Scirra forums (possibly also on the old forums which should still be online right now) somewhere but you'll have to search to find the posts sadly as they've been buried over time.

Then over time Scirra dropped down to just pure HTML5, promising that the technology would catch up and work out better for all. They pushed out reports of near-native performance tests (when what they really meant is that the code is more optimized than CC, but if those same optimizations were applied to a native exporter it would obviously perform better in most situations), and many other reasons why this is the best choice for us, the developers of games using their tool.

It's 2016, 5 years after development started of C2, and I still find CC exported games to perform smoother on my Windows computers.

I switched to CC from Clickteam KnP/TGF/MMF, so the "graphical coding" was not novel, just better. The editor in Construct tools is also way better to me too, but again the complaint isn't about the editor but the actual games, the products I get from this tool.

In a way, C2 is exactly like "an easy accountant software", it's not an end product or a source of entertainment in itself, it's what I do with it that matters because it's a tool. I'm not even mad at the price because I agree it's relatively inexpensive (even considering that Unity and other big engines are now free for general use or low monthly fees for commercial titles), and Scirra should charge business customers more if they put native export into it.

I'm mad because I believed in Construct 2, worked together with a friend to make over 50% of a game, which was then funded on Kickstarter with the dreams of "Win, Mac, Linux + WiiU" that hence became an expectation from the backers (read: customers), and had to turn up with the same excuse Ashley gives us: "We're sorry, issues with a third party (C2 -> Node Webkit -> Chrome -> HTML5 + WebGL) prevented this from working on anything but high-end Windows desktops".

We were lucky enough to release to Steam, but there's still plenty of devices that should have no problems with the game suffering from frame skipping, missed collision detections, and etc. Especially in screencapture/let's play footage. And ultimately we can't port without totally re-writing the game.

Even a method to quickly export games into something easier imported into other engines would make Construct 2 100% more useful for developers who want to make more than lightweight or mobile games.

Quicksand

There's less layers (points of failure) in native export:

The driver issues Ashley mentioned were almost always AMD related, which is hilarious because WebGL still has issues on AMD devices too, and the solution changes from "wait for AMD to fix it" to "wait for NodeJS to update chrome, but if that doesn't fix it then wait for Chrome to make sure it's not their fault, then if it isn't hopefully Google will push AMD to fix it".

And why is WebGL worse on AMD? Because it's already bad at OpenGL anyway, which WebGL is pretty much based on:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/ ... hmark.3806

For these next two links Vendor A is NVIDIA, B is AMD, and C is Intel.

http://richg42.blogspot.ca/2014/05/the- ... ality.html

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/18234 ... -of-opengl

Also a relevant link for how CC and C2 compared at the time when C2 started claiming to be "as fast as native": is-webgl-slow-on-some-machines_t75194

Now this is a great topic. And both sides have a point, in my situation I'm sticking with C2, so far it has been the easiest, fastest way to achieve my projects. Later in the future i might use different engines, tools, etc. But for the meantime C2 is my #1 weapon of choice

Honestly, I have been around the web development world a bit, and Construct is, by far, the most expansive, standards-compliant, bug-free, easy-to-use web development platform that I have found. This software trivially easily exceeds GameMaker in HTML5 game development, and has the potential to match Google Web Toolkit pound for pound in critical enterprise applications if developed in that direction.

I, and my team, have nearly two years of time and effort invested into Construct, and we have never looked back. We tried a number of platforms before selecting Construct, including Google Web Toolkit, GameMaker, D3, raw HTML5, and none were as easy to learn or as quick to demonstrably perform our most intensive graphics requirements without overloading our test machines. Our test litmus program involved generating one hundred thousand objects and displaying all of them in screen in a fully zoom/pannable dynamic user interface at once. GameMaker was not able to do this without stalling and freezing our test machine.

No, C2 is one of the most unbelievable pieces of software that I have found in the web development world, and we are very anxiously awaiting C3.

It's always good to see these kind of satisfied posts.

This is the price we pay for having a great and intuitive game engine.

True. Adopting new technologies is never an easy road. We have a great, intuitive, fast and fun to work with engine, but on the other hand, we have to accept the problems HTML5 brings with itself now. I don't dare to guess where HTML5 will be in a few years. It's very promising even now, despite the wrapper problems and more and more devices include the support for it as a way to make standalone applications on their system. They may have stated that HTML5 is a ready and released tech, but there's definetly space for improvement on the integration part.

I wouldn't judge anyone for dropping C2. I know sometimes frustration reaches the limit and you simply say "ahh f*** it!". Moving to Unity or something like that would probably give you better performance and feeling of stability, but surely development won't be that fun as with C2.

No one should be judged for dropping any software that doesn't fit their needs. FMFM You might find what you are looking for in Unity, UE4, etc., but as I said before it will never be bug free. Every software has it's issues, we just happen to see on the issues comes with Construct 2 because we are using it.

I can see the discouragment and dissapointment what was caused by these issues and it's unlikely that these will be fixed soon, since it's out of Scirra's hands. I don't see it as an excuse, since in the end, we still have to face those bugs be it whoever's fault. But I still won't leave Construct 2, because despite these problems it still has many advantages over other engines which makes it the best choice for me. I have some hope that these problems will be fixed in the future, and I also have big hopes for Construct 3, even if it will still use the same runtime.

Sometimes people just have to take a break. FMFM If you do leave, please, after a few months come back here and tell us how the change turned out for you.

The problem with native export is you need multiple codebases & renderers to go cross-platform, like CC with DX9, it's windows only and requires a lot of effort to port.

But guess what?

Vulkan is the answer.

It's cross-platform, Windows, Linux, Android.

MAC OSX has Metal, which is a derivative of Vulkan.

The problem with native export is you need multiple codebases & renderers to go cross-platform, like CC with DX9, it's windows only and requires a lot of effort to port.

But guess what?

Vulkan is the answer.

It's cross-platform, Windows, Linux, Android.

MAC OSX has Metal, which is a derivative of Vulkan.

Looks good. Are you suggesting Vulkan wrapper, or for c2/c3 to completely switch api?

https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

Well, they went with DX9 for CC and it runs really good on PC.

Why not look into Vulkan for C3? Probably too late for that though, as C3 is just a UI overhaul.

I agree with Silverforce Vulkan is amazing and the things it can do to android. If c3 can utilize such a low level api in some way it will give a performance boost may be?

Probably too late for that though, as C3 is just a UI overhaul.

I think so too. However I'd love to see Ashely's comment on this Vulkan thing. It's an interesting topic imo.