3 years have passed, not much have changed

No disrespect, but I actually completely disagree with the title of this topic.

I used to do a lot of work in Flash, and about 2-3 years ago when Flash started going down hill, I started looking for another engine to use.

I tried everything from Construct 2, Corona, Stencyl, MonkeyX, Multimedia Fusion 2.5. Panda Engine, Phaser and MANY others.

I wanted to be best equipped to make a decision on which engine I would choose to work with in the future.

When I first used Construct 2 (2-3 years ago), I wasn't blown away by the performance and was comparing HTML5 to Flash. I was also using C2 wrong in many ways.

Recently I've come back to it and I genuinely believe that it's one of (if not the best) engine money can buy. I found so many useful improvements, not just performance, but small things like being able to drag scenes around and so on.

C2 is the most updated / bug free software I've ever used. I can get my 'flash style' games running in a browser on an iPhone 5s at 60fps. The creators of C2 also frequently communicate and reply to questions on the forum.

Every single other engine I've used had issues. Ranging from graphical flaws, to unsupported features to game breaking bugs and so on. If you only look at the 'other engines' forums, you will see a whole bunch of people complaining about all sorts of stuff.

The exponential improvements in mobile devices are so fast now, that I personally don't believe it has a point thinking about going native, (if you're making 2d games). Native engines have problem too and plenty of them.

I've recently noticed a more and more C2 games on the app store front page (I've even made a C2 folder on my phone - just to keep track of them).

I honestly think that give it a couple of years and the whole native vs html5 dilemma will be redundant.

[quote:17evpfr9]I don't think anyone properly appreciates how many people are successfully publishing Cordova/desktop games with Construct 2. If everything works fine, there's not much reason to post to the forum. If things don't work, people tend to come and post on the forum. I think this creates a distorted perception that these tools are not working at all. For the most part, I think they are working fine. That's not to say nobody has issues with them, there are bugs and issues like with any technology, but I think it's blown out of proportion.

Ashley - I completely agree and that's why I think it would be awesome to showcase as much of this stuff as possible, that way existing and potential customers would see what's possible

I think the most of the performance issues could be solved by offering us methods to load/unload assets & layouts at will and not just automatically by the engine itself.

In my opinion C2's current "dictatorship" with next to no control about the things mentioned above is a big mistake and I really hope, no I count on C3 to finally bring the right changes to this part of the engine.

Personally this is a key selling point for me and I honestly wouldn't consider purchasing C3, if it doesn't deliver any improvements for this.

Just as a side note, I think that C2 is currently the only game engine on the market that doesn't offer features like this.

(Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I honestly think that give it a couple of years and the whole native vs html5 dilemma will be redundant.

Good luck with the competitors that will offer Native and HTML5 export with a visual editor.

Trust me, HTML5's performance won't be the only thing redundant then (of course this is a reference about Flash).

[quote:ffwfcdab]Good luck with the competitors that will offer Native and HTML5 export with a visual editor.

TheRealDannyyy - I respect your opinion, but from my experience this is not as lucrative as it sounds. I've tried multiple visual editors that offer HTML5 and Native (eg Stencyl, MMF2.5, Godot etc.) and I find that none of them do everything well. They try to foucs on covering everything (jack of all trades) and evrything ends up slightly broken + it never gets fixed, because the resources aren't there for the maintenance.

In these "jack of all trades engines" , there are usually very big problems with performance (HTML5), scaling bugs and I could go on.

Construct 2 does HTML5 very well - to the point that I can be confident offering licences to sponsors, as I know my game won't break - and if by any chance it does, I know that the Scirra team is on top of it and any critical bugs will be fixed soon.

The other issue is that I'm yet to find an engine in which you can put a game together as quick as you can in C2 - this alone makes C2 trump anything out there.

In my search for a replacement too for Flash, I stumbled upon engines like "Spark", which is about a year overdue for its beta release - which leads me to believe, that even once it's out, the updates will be few and far between. Quite frankly I would be surprised if anything came out, that would flawlessly export to all platforms without any issues. I don't believe, that these companies have the resources to maintain their engines from that many angles (sufficiently).

C2 is a quality product which I feel confident using, my latest game runs smoothly on an iPhone 5s which is already generations behind.

I personally fully support Scirra in sticking to their guns (HTML5), focusing on whats important, and do it well (like they have been doing).

PS. People also forget that HTML5 is a market of it's own and can be monetized just like the app store.

Ashley

[quote:1d2lwvwa]I've written a number of blog posts, with objective measurements, that show it has. I don't think the fact one game that potentially has a performance issue outweighs all of that?

Ok, let me rephrase my statement then. Performance has improved, but it still not good enough. Just take a look at the web development ecosystem as a whole, React has ReactJS, Nativescript is gaining enormous traction, and even something like ionic relies very heavily on hooks to native components, even vue.js, a newcomer has already 2 option for native compiling.

To me this suggest that HTML5 failed to deliver, and devs are not willing to put up with long dev cycles focused on optimising a lackluster technology.

[quote:1d2lwvwa]I am baffled as to what to do when on one side, we are criticised for relying too much on third-party code, then on the other side, people are suggesting to solve problems by relying even more on third-party code

Not really, as I suggested Scirra becoming the one maintaining it. Audio on iOS is clearly problematic, to me having the user touch the screen before sounds can start is unacceptable. Considering there are issues on that department why not use native when possible?

[quote:1d2lwvwa]I don't think anyone properly appreciates how many people are successfully publishing Cordova/desktop games with Construct 2. If everything works fine, there's not much reason to post to the forum. If things don't work, people tend to come and post on the forum. I think this creates a distorted perception that these tools are not working at all. For the most part, I think they are working fine. That's not to say nobody has issues with them, there are bugs and issues like with any technology, but I think it's blown out of proportion.

Agreed, that can be said from everything, from cars to food. It's always the one complaining that flood the forums.

If nobody points out where there are issues we would never move forward. Unity, UE4, Game Maker and all the other framework are full of people complaining and sometimes good things comes out of it.

—

[quote:1d2lwvwa]In my experience, you always need to optimize, especially true for mobiles.

There's no way around it, not until there's enough brute force in devices to overcome inefficient coding.

And yes, C2's event system is very much coding. How you do it has a massive affect on the final performance.

Fair enough, but honestly what tools do we have in C2? It's a blackbox for most part and debugging/optimising can become a very hard task on mobile. There is no memory management as TheRealDannyyy pointed out, and for the most part optimisation is all trial and error which, couple with the hard deployment pipeline (again on mobile, desktop is heaps better) that I outlined in my previous comments becomes a timesink which is unjustifiable, at least for me.

Ninjadoodle

[quote:1d2lwvwa]No disrespect, but I actually completely disagree with the title of this topic.

None taken mate

[quote:1d2lwvwa]I honestly think that give it a couple of years and the whole native vs html5 dilemma will be redundant.

We have been hearing this for the past 5 years, still waiting. The way the market is moving it's pretty clear that the future are js to native compilers.

I do agree with you, C2 is bar none the best HTML5 game engine on the market. When you stray from desktop (NW or websites) and you start going into mobile, a whole lot of issues start to surface and that is where other tools do the job better.

Ok I'am really curious as to what your game has that it is running slow. How many sprites onscreen? Do you put code into groups and turn them off when you don't need them?

I do want to help so instead of focusing on C2 , lets focus on your game. I have a game called blast AD whih has 25+ enemies onscreen not counting gunshots and other special effects.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... t.ad&hl=en

Does your game have more moving sprites? Are you using the pin behavior in your game? Are you using other 3rd party plugins ? I have helped people before and I'am sure we can get to the bottom of this.

I think the most of the performance issues could be solved by offering us methods to load/unload assets & layouts at will and not just automatically by the engine itself.

In my opinion C2's current "dictatorship" with next to no control about the things mentioned above is a big mistake and I really hope, no I count on C3 to finally bring the right changes to this part of the engine.

Personally this is a key selling point for me and I honestly wouldn't consider purchasing C3, if it doesn't deliver any improvements for this.

Just as a side note, I think that C2 is currently the only game engine on the market that doesn't offer features like this.

(Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I think it's due to a browser limitation. This has been requested many times and I really hope that this will be a thing in C3. I know that most projects won't need it, but there are some which do. Having a good automatic method to load/unload assets is a great thing, but having more control is always good. I also think that it would attract more developers.

I personally fully support Scirra in sticking to their guns (HTML5), focusing on whats important, and do it well (like they have been doing).

I can't agree more.

C2 has made some significant improvements in the past years (like Ashley listed them). I love the software, it's a pleasure to work and teach with it. I have to admit, I haven't gotten into iOS development yet, but I can't see any performance related problems in my projects on both PC and Android.

Hello,

well, I saw performance problems in my first project, was a finger game, platform jump, infinity jump.

What I did:

Every time that one platform goes off screen {destroy, call function new platform on top}

Inside the function had one var to save the random for the next platform and create.

I made all using 720p size and graphic but with 3Mb of size I feel that it was not running smooth, like changing FPS every time, I have been debugging and was all "normal".

Even using "tops" smartphones was not smooth.

But... is just one create sprite.. really simple.

What about if I would like to make something complex...

I think it's due to a browser limitation. This has been requested many times and I really hope that this will be a thing in C3. I know that most projects won't need it, but there are some which do. Having a good automatic method to load/unload assets is a great thing, but having more control is always good. I also think that it would attract more developers.

I honestly doubt that the browser vendors are at fault here, as far as I know other engines which also use HTML5 as their back-end, already have systems for advanced memory management. I'd rather think that this is something related to C2 not being capable of doing it.

We never really got a set in stone answer for this one I think.

I believe that Ashley once said something about unloading audio (?) from memory, either way my hopes towards the implementation of a system like this for C2 are pretty low.

I just wanted to point out that there is nothing wrong with the current system, It's just that some advanced (or mobile) games tend to suffer from performance issues and I think that this might be a good workaround.

I honestly doubt that the browser vendors are at fault here, as far as I know other engines which also use HTML5 as their back-end, already have systems for advanced memory management. I'd rather think that this is something related to C2 not being capable of doing it.

We never really got a set in stone answer for this one I think.

I believe that Ashley once said something about unloading audio (?) from memory, either way my hopes towards the implementation of a system like this for C2 are pretty low.

I just wanted to point out that there is nothing wrong with the current system, It's just that some advanced (or mobile) games tend to suffer from performance issues and I think that this might be a good workaround.

I sincerely hope that you are right and nothing prevents Scirra to implement this feature. As I said it was requested by many developers in numerous topics and it's also one of my most anticipated features. But I don't want to turn this topic into a "C3 feature request" topic.

I sincerely hope that you are right and nothing prevents Scirra to implement this feature. As I said it was requested by many developers in numerous topics and it's also one of my most anticipated features. But I don't want to turn this topic into a "C3 feature request" topic.

Yep, sorry that I did drift away from the main topic for a bit.

To provide something usefull, HERE are all the other updates and enhancements that C2 got over the last 3 years.

Quite a lot of improvements but there is still a lot of room for future performance updates in my opinion.

Just picking up on an earlier issue about ios playback of audio needing a touch to start. To get round this add your audio track as a "Sound" rather than "Music" and it will autoplay on startup without needing a touch. Exported via Visual Studio TACO to .ipa. Works just fine on my iphone 5s ios 10 and ipad mini 1 ios 9. Seems ok with full music tracks, also cures the same problem on android.

I've tried multiple visual editors that offer HTML5 and Native (eg Stencyl, MMF2.5, Godot etc.) and I find that none of them do everything well.

Stencyl is hardly a product that provides a fair comparison.

It's like taking a Lamborghini, comparing it to a Datson 720, and then proclaiming the Lam to be the best sport's car ever.

A fair evaluation is judging the product against it's true competitors (Gamemaker, etc).

(FTR: Both YOYO Games and their product is too unfriendly for my liking)