Construct 3 in your Ideal World?

When it works properly offline.

I just worked on a project when my WiFi suddenly cut off, resulting me cannot preview my project. Alright so I restarted the editor, but still no dice. When I restarted Chrome, Construct just stuck on loading screen.

Okay I know I should've seen the notification "Construct is ready to be used offline" yadda yadda but I only seen that notification only once when I first used the app, and now it's nowhere to be seen. There's not even an easy solution, like a button to redownload whole necessary files maybe? Why can't it possible? Does Ashley have 100% confidence that every Chrome installs is reliable for Construct to run offline and when issue happens, he would just shift the blame on Chrome or my browser cache?

So in my ideal world the software itself is fine for what it is, but I hope Construct would find independence from its reliance on third party.

It's an interesting question and one I've not given much thought to, because nearly everything about running a small company like ours is basically about ruthlessly prioritising extremely limited resources between hundreds of possible things that we could be working on. However if we had unlimited resources, a few things I'd like to see would be:

- making C3 a comprehensive animation tool as well, based around the timeline. This would involve scene graphs, full vector support everywhere images can be used, and more advanced animation features. Basically what Flash used to be for animation on the web.

- full support for using C3 as a pure coding IDE in addition to event sheets (note this is taking nothing away from event sheets, which are still an essential part of the product). Basically the best of both worlds, excelling in both programming and non-programming.

- full international support, with the full C3 manual and all tutorials translated in to lots of languages, and support teams all over the world able to provide good support in a wide range of languages and countries

- widespread use of C3 in education internationally, with comprehensive curricula for teachers to use for a wide range of education systems around the world (including in a wide range of languages)

- pretty much everything filed on the suggestions platform, including some basic 3D features, ability to make plugins/behaviors etc in events, and the long tail of everything else everyone wants.

It's nice to dream, but we have very limited resources. I don't think many people appreciate how much everything we do is driven by opportunity cost - i.e. doing one thing means not doing everything else that could be done. So is the thing we're doing the most important thing that we could be doing? It's a really hard judgement and often impossible to tell. I know some people may feel impatient when asking for features that were asked for a long time ago but still haven't been done, but imagine 20 similar features with lots of people asking for those, each one taking 6 months (so there's ~10 years of work being asked for). If we pick two and spend an entire year doing them, 18 are still left behind, and that's 18 sets of users still impatiently asking for the same things. It's impossible to do everything.

Oh, and if we could throw dozens of developers at it, then console support too.

Also in most of these areas you can see we've made some kind of effort towards them, but there is always a long way further we could go!

It's an interesting question and one I've not given much thought to, because nearly everything about running a small company like ours is basically about ruthlessly prioritising extremely limited resources between hundreds of possible things that we could be working on. However if we had unlimited resources, a few things I'd like to see would be:

- making C3 a comprehensive animation tool as well, based around the timeline. This would involve scene graphs, full vector support everywhere images can be used, and more advanced animation features. Basically what Flash used to be for animation on the web.

- full support for using C3 as a pure coding IDE in addition to event sheets (note this is taking nothing away from event sheets, which are still an essential part of the product). Basically the best of both worlds, excelling in both programming and non-programming.

- full international support, with the full C3 manual and all tutorials translated in to lots of languages, and support teams all over the world able to provide good support in a wide range of languages and countries

- widespread use of C3 in education internationally, with comprehensive curricula for teachers to use for a wide range of education systems around the world (including in a wide range of languages)

- pretty much everything filed on the suggestions platform, including some basic 3D features, ability to make plugins/behaviors etc in events, and the long tail of everything else everyone wants.

It's nice to dream, but we have very limited resources. I don't think many people appreciate how much everything we do is driven by opportunity cost - i.e. doing one thing means not doing everything else that could be done. So is the thing we're doing the most important thing that we could be doing? It's a really hard judgement and often impossible to tell. I know some people may feel impatient when asking for features that were asked for a long time ago but still haven't been done, but imagine 20 similar features with lots of people asking for those, each one taking 6 months (so there's ~10 years of work being asked for). If we pick two and spend an entire year doing them, 18 are still left behind, and that's 18 sets of users still impatiently asking for the same things. It's impossible to do everything.

I'm looking forward to this

- full support for using C3 as a pure coding IDE

I have to emphasise that I wrote all of that assuming we had unlimited resources. In reality we have limited resources and we'd be lucky to do a fraction of that. Please do not assume all of that is coming.

Indeed, this was just a hypothetical, thanks for the response Ashley.

That's what the addon SDK is for.