The Construct suggestions platform (2024 edition)

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  • Thanks, great platform change!

    It breaks backwards compatibility. For example a user may suggest a completely new and different way for the Families feature to work. Even if it's a brilliant idea, it would likely break thousands of existing projects that already rely on the feature working the way it already does. Users whose projects break between Construct versions rightly get upset, so we strive to ensure compatibility between Construct updates. Ideas which would obviously break this are not something we can really do in practice. We can in some cases add a parallel feature and try to phase out the old one, but this is technically complicated, and confusing to users who wonder why there are two options and which one they're meant to use.

    If in this example, Families cannot be changed or updated, but the new feature suggestion would be a big improvement: the parallel feature sounds like a good idea, and perhaps one way to offset the confusion for users would be to name it so that it's clearly an upgraded version. Like maybe something like "Families 2" could appear in existing projects? That way people can opt into the new families, without breaking their old projects. And in fresh new projects maybe you wouldn't even need to show the old "Families v1"? It's a bit weird, but maybe it's still better than never being able to update some old features.

  • Update for 2024: we are moving the suggestions platform to GitHub! This allows filing suggestions in a similar way to bug reports, and it uses the same account system. You can find the new place to submit suggestions here:

    https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-feature-requests

    Please note we plan to continue to reset all suggestions every year.

    Also note the old suggestions platform based on aha.io will be shut down in the near future. We will continue to maintain its existing content up until March 1st 2024. At any time beyond that the old service may be shut down. Be sure to preserve any content you want from the old platforms by that date.

    The original post has also been updated with this information.

    Ashley I care about C3 and my ideas, but I think copy-pasting 40 ideas is too much! Some of my ideas have many votes already, how would that be transferred?

    Could you please consider the following suggestion:

    1. Prevent people from posting any new ideas on aha.io

    2. Keep implementing ideas from aha.io for 1 year.

    3. Archive aha.io after 1 year.

    Also please consider tagging ideas that are unlikely to be implemented, so we don't copy-paste them to the new platform and they get shelved either way ..

    Some community members have spent a lot of their work time to post these ideas, so please consider valuing their time and effort.

    I've read that aha.io has an API, please consider exporting the current relevant ideas to github using a script or something.

    It might not be a "perfect" solution, but I think it is a compromise between your team's effort and the community effort. After all, most people will find it daunting to copy-paste their ideas every year, and it is a loss for the product on the long term.

    Thank you.

  • the parallel feature sounds like a good idea

    Part of the problem of doing this is for backwards compatibility the old feature can never really be removed. Deprecating and removing a feature widely used for many years is infeasible. This means we have two separate code paths for the same feature, both of which are complex and must be maintained long-term, and any significant code changes/upgrades/optimisations have to be re-tested with the old feature to ensure it isn't broken, and sometimes can even preclude making the improvement. A completely redesigned feature sometimes doesn't always cover exactly 100% of what the old one did, and so then you get people who ask for the old feature to still be available to do the things the old feature did; if you do that, now you have two duplicate features which both need active maintenance. You can do something like hide the old feature, but you will still get years of confusion as people who keep running in to old tutorials, documentations, lesson plans, printed books, or people who used it a few years ago and then came back after a long gap, repeatedly getting confused by the fact things look and work differently now.

    It's a really painful process to go through that substantially increases our workload, adds a lot of complexity to the codebase, and ends up confusing people for years afterwards. In general I would say that we are going to avoid that at all costs, and suggestions should take that in to account. It has to be really, really worth it. We went through all that with the new functions feature, as I think the improvement was worth it, but it was still far more difficult and long-running transition than I imagined.

    I care about C3 and my ideas, but I think copy-pasting 40 ideas is too much!

    That's about a year's work on your suggestions alone. I think there was about 9 years worth of work in suggestions posted in 2023 alone. Part of the problem we have is there is just far, far, far more suggestions posted than we could possibly have any chance of doing. I would say only submit a few of your most important suggestions, as making as many suggestions as that just means you're submitting so much work there is no chance most of it will be done in that year. If you submit a smaller number of suggestions it's more likely one of the things you care about will be done.

  • That being said Nested Families don't need a "parallel feature" or to break backward compatibility. It involves a lot of rework under the hood but it's not incompatible with the existing Family features and it wouldn't break any project if it was done someday.

    It wouldn't be confusing either if the family inheritance support was added some day. People who don't need it wouldn't see the difference and most people are actually confused it's not supported yet.

  • Wouldn't it be easier if you only allowed users to post one idea at a time? Otherwise, you have to consider dozens of ideas from just one user. Obviously you won't be able to implement them all. It is also not clear which idea this user had the most desired.

  • The voting system is here to show what the community wants, knowing what a single user wants the most is irrelevant.

    Allowing 1 feature request per user would be as pointless and ineffictive as allowing 1 bug report per user. (which i think you agree would be annoying given the fact you submit more than 50% of all bug reports)

  • Reducing the number of reports will slow down the speed of error correction. But if you reduce the number of ideas, it will help reduce the time spent filtering out ideas that will not be implemented.

  • Bugs are about technical issues, Feature request are about useability/UX/limitation issues.

    I would argue a painful workflow that the whole community is required to do every X minutes in the engine or a big limitation impossible to overcome no matter how skilled you are at JS/Addondev/EventsheetTrick is far more important to report and urgent than a very obscure bug that happens in 10% of the time when you smash your keyboard randomly in a full moon evening (especially since sometimes fixing that weird bug takes 50x more time than exposing an existing method to the Addon SDK for exemple and that would solve several of the most annoying C3 limitations in 1 shot)

    IMO, reducing the number of your bug reports to keep only the ones that actually matter wouldn't slow down the speed of developement of the engine, quite the opposite. But no one is trying to enforce Scirra to stop you from doing this, so I would appreciate if you let other users provide feedback to Scirra Team as well

    The community filters the idea themself thanks to the voting system.

    Reducing the number of idea reduce the quality of feedback Scirra receives, and will slow down the speed of useability/power improvement of the engine by not giving a chance of the tiny clever ideas to pop out.

    Also it would incitate users to request a bunch of things in a single request while it's more efficient if each thing is requested as seperate suggestions, or it would incitate to only submit the very big brand new feature stuff while sometime a "quick tiny" ACE/SDK addition can be a real game-changer.

  • Sorry, you're right. I always forget that our job is to overwhelm the engine developers with a ton of work.

  • Sorry, you're right. I always forget that our job is to overwhelm the engine developers with a ton of work.

    This u ?

    770 bug reports.

    I mean i'm thankful for all the work you put into this and it's useful for all of us in many situations.

    But please don't speak about overwhelming the devs, especially since all bug reports are always treated as urgent while it's not clear if anyone on earth will even face them once. There is not any kind of community voting/prioritization for bugs as opposed to feature suggestions. Also we all know feature requests are not meant to all be developed and pushed, only the most popular/easy-to-add/relevant, so it's less an issue.

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  • It's early days but I'm mixed about using github.

    It's already approaching 100 suggestions and 90% aren't of interest to me personally, I did vote on ones I did find interesting! But gotta admit, it makes me lose hope that new suggestions will be seen (assuming Scirra only sort by thumbs up, but perhaps they will browse throughout). A new idea may appear, get a few votes, then disappear into the void if it didn't gain enough votes, only to be found if someone stumbles upon it or if they did a search with the right search terms.

    Maybe would be good for a "trending" or "hot" sorting for suggestions that are getting sudden recent votes or comments, if github allows this? Maybe it exists already, bit new to this.

    It may also be harder for new suggestions to thrive because it's not grouped afaik, where the old system could have "event sheet" category and can see top suggestions just for this - although this may not matter depending on how Scirra browse (I guess I imagine they might think "OK today, let's check out some event sheet suggestions", but maybe not). That's how I used to browse, I wouldn't browse areas of C3 I don't currently use, and would mostly browse categories I have an interest in.

    Also without grouping, most people may not feel eager to browse randomly through a list of things they don't know about. I felt that way when browsing recently, just lots of stuff I didn't understand or didn't find interesting.

    Imagine when it reaches 200 or 300 suggestions, is anyone able to genuinely tick "I checked if this exists already", would need to rely on a search (where you may use different terms and may mistakenly miss an existing suggestion), or alternatively, browse every page. The old system was manageable since categories made it easier/quicker to check if exists.

    Wilson's point is curious, if people did have 1 suggestion at a time, would indeed help keep it manageable and everyone has to think carefully what they deem as important, which is what Scirra always hope people will do. I can't say I fully agree because I posted about 5 suggestions already, and all of them I'd love to see, but then it's interesting if I had to genuinely pick only 1, what would I pick? (prob would go with "custom icons" eheheh pls vote).

    Although if limited to 1 suggestion... People could just make new accounts to post multiple suggestions. No way to win. But that was already a frowned upon issue with old system, where vote spamming from alt accounts could occur (tho I suppose this is catchable in github too if sudden unusual accounts appear).

  • Infact I counted manually, assume we did have only 1 suggestion per person.

    There's currently 64 suggestions, subtract 51 (so everyone had 1 suggestion), and there would only be 13 suggestions!

    I do agree it's more about gathering community opinion, but does make it look way more clean if it was just 1 per person. Very mixed, I don't know.

  • There are 64 suggestions on the platform rn, not that close to 100 and it's normal it went fast during the first days because people posted their most wished/relevant suggestion from the old platform as there was a reset. We all make different games (Art-Heavy/Data-Heavy/UI-Heavy/simple hypercasual/Multiplayer/Performance-sensitive), for different platforms (Web/Mobile/Desktop/Consoles), have different skills (VisualScripting/JS/AddonDev/HTML/CSS/Shaders ?) so it's normal most suggestions don't please us.

    Again community voting is the best way to help prioritazing stuff we could imagine, no need to think too far and no one is expecting every single issue to be implemented in the last beta.

    Github provide a bunch of way to filter and sort issues.

    Just sort them from the "most recent" to see the new ones, "recently updated" to see recent discussions, or use searching syntax to filter only last month.

    For me the only annoying thing with Github is that the Likes are displayed only if you sort them by Likes. But you could still filter issues from last month only (or any filtering you want) + sort them by likes.

    Being able to add tags like "Behavior", "Editor" could help indeed but i suspect tags are reserved for Scirra to set status for the requests "In Developement", "Planned", "Will Not implement" etc. I wonder if using tags for both would be possible, it implies only a few tags are available to use for the users (categories but not development status), if it's possible it would be cool.

    FWIW Godot, the most "democratic" game engine out there also use Github issues, doesn't limit the amount of suggestion per user and don't care about having 3955 opened issues (with about 7 new ones per day), given their incredible growth and speed of developement i would say it works quite well.

  • ...it's normal it went fast during the first days because people posted their most wished/relevant suggestion from the old platform as there was a reset.

    Ah true, this went right past me.

    Github provide a bunch of way to filter and sort issues.

    Just sort them from the "most recent" to see the new ones, "recently updated" to see recent discussions, or use searching syntax to filter only last month.

    That helps, thanks for pointing that out! Particularly "recently updated" even if a random obscure old suggestion that got 0 votes, suddenly gets comment, then it's in the front of the list if sorting this way.

    Being able to add tags like "Behavior", "Editor" could help indeed but i suspect tags are reserved for Scirra...

    Yeah, for now it's doable to scroll through a few pages, hopefully some form of categorisation can be done long term if suggestions get into the hundreds.

    FWIW Godot, the most "democratic" game engine out there also use Github issues, doesn't limit the amount of suggestion per user and don't care about having 3955 opened issues (with about 7 new ones per day), given their incredible growth and speed of developement i would say it works quite well.

    Excellent point! Understandably Godot may have a significantly bigger team (I'm not sure) but the fact they use Github for suggestions shows that it is tried and tested, which gives me a lot of confidence! My opinion is a lot less mixed now.

  • But godot operates way different, I don't think you can really compare that. Imagine poor Ashley sifting through 3000 suggestions :D

    I'd say it would be ok to limit it to 1 (or maybe 1-3?) suggestion per user but only if Scirra then responds to every suggestion in a reasonable timeframe (~1-2 months?). So you'd pick your personal most wanted suggestion, and then you'd get a guaranteed answer as to whether it will be considered or not. Either way, once you have the answer, your slot would be free again for another suggestion if you want. So users focus on what they really want and there's a limit to the amount of possible suggestions floating around in terms of workload. I can see though why Scirra does not want to actually give definitive answers to the suggestions and rather keeps it in limbo.

    I'm actually personally running relatively low on new suggestions, and I'd rather see added robustness to the existing stuff. Aka more exposed ACEs, added functionality etc.

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