How complex can graphics be with this engine?

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  • Hello! how are you? I'm new around here.

    I am not a english spekaer, graphic designer, forty years old and I always worked on graphic design, advertising and animation in 3d and 2d. A month ago, like so many at th start of isolation, I finally found time to learn something new and made my first mini videogame with construct3, and I really liked it. So I wanted to do something more advanced, mainly regarding the graphics. I consider myself perfectly capable of making and animating graphics like those of "ori and the blind forest", but I will never be able to program (at this age you already know your limitations), so I am seeing what is the most complex (visually speaking ) that i can do in construct3. So, before making the graphics, I wanted to ask you: can be done long, non-repetitive scenarios with a parallax effect in construct3? are there examples of games like this already made with this engine? Or should I discard the idea and make graphics simpler?

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  • Welcome on board!

    As I understand you are asking about whether it's possible to create a platformer with large complex levels and a parallax background? Yes, that is absolutely possible and you will find lots and lots of features and tools in Construct that make this sort of thing easier.

    Depending on the actual complexity of your game, the amount of objects on screen etc etc you may hit upon performance issues - i.e. choppy framerate - kind of sooner than you would in lower-level/native/traditional programming tools (and by kind of sooner I mean a lot sooner) but frankly the ease of use of Construct outweighs it for most purposes. You then just go and optimize stuff or find more efficient solutions which you might want to frame to yourself as part of the fun;)

  • I'v been doing some prototypes with Construct 3 to see how far I can push it performance-wise.

    My biggest one yet is a pseudo-3D dungeon generator; it runs at 4K resolution using textures reaching up to 3000x3000px along with a dynamic shadow system I concocted; all of this without so much as a dropped frame.

    Using construct2 I couldn't even dream of reaching this, C3 is an absolute powerhouse in comparison.

    I'm still testing things out myself, but from what I'v seen and experienced; Construct3 can handle high resolution sprites/visuals really well.

  • My biggest one yet is a pseudo-3D dungeon generator; it runs at 4K resolution using textures reaching up to 3000x3000px along with a dynamic shadow system I concocted; all of this without so much as a dropped frame.

    Using construct2 I couldn't even dream of reaching this, C3 is an absolute powerhouse in comparison.

    Wow! A few years back I made a simple but fast moving space flying game in C2. Completely flat 2D and around 20-30 objects on screen at any given time. It tended to stutter. No doubt both Construct's engine and generally hardware have come a long way...

  • Construct renders with WebGL, which is basically OpenGL, providing native-grade graphics capabilities. From what I've seen over the years, anyone having performance issues is generally maxing out the hardware rather than running in to any kind of limits in Construct. You still have the same hardware limits no matter what software you use, so in that sense Construct is as good as the hardware.

  • This is a game I’m working on with Construct 3 at the moment.

    streamable.com/rc4t9u

    There may be a bit of stuttering as I’m spawning a dozen projectiles, each emitting light and rendering shadows for every object in the environment, all through Construct’s event system, and this is running on preview mode! Once exported, the stutter is also not present.

    The game normally runs smoothly at 100fps without stutters on my PC and 60fps on my ipad.

    Construct 3 has been handling the graphics astonishingly well, I would say comparable to any native desktop, memory management is handled great too. Coming from someone who’ve been hard coding games for years, the engine provides so many conveniences that graphical optimizations is rarely ever something on my mind.

    When someone complains any engine isn’t powerful graphically today for any 2D game, It’s usually due to the lack of understanding on how to code optimally. If Super Mario was 31kb, I don’t see how with today’s hardware, you can still worry about 2D game performance on any engine, as long as you’re not abusing the conveniences engines provide too much.

    Ori used some tricks to get large textures running in the engine as well, and there’s a lot of things to note when dealing with large textures that will be universal on all engines, such as making them out of smaller parts and using lower resolution textures and blurring them or scaling them with texture filtering. Making them loopable is another trick.

    Hope this helps!

  • If you can really draw graphics like those then there will be no problems as far as developing a nice looking game with parallax scrolling and all that, but you will definitely run into a wall when trying to do realistic water effects, simulations and similar stuff. Probably no way around it, but maybe sort of climb half way up the wall with some tricks

  • an article I read about that Ori game last month said they had 80 developers working on it, and it took them about 5 years. Regardless of the engine, it takes a lot of skill and hard work to make something look that good.

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  • an article I read about that Ori game last month said they had 80 developers working on it, and it took them about 5 years. Regardless of the engine, it takes a lot of skill and hard work to make something look that good.

    This^^

    You have to know how to do it. You will need some help.

    Anyway about the only thing we don't have out of the box, is sprite deformations.

    The hooks are supposedly there, but it is a fairly large undertaking, so who knows when we will get it.

  • Thank you all! I did not expect so many responses so fast. Knowing that it is possible is enough for me. I am very aware of the time it takes to develop graphics and animations, so I wanted to check before if it made sense to start working on it. Since I don't do it for commercial purposes, I do it for pleasure when I can, and I really don't even intend to develop a complex game but rather a user-controlled animation, I can spend the necessary time without it being profitable or convenient.

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