effects are a nice idea, but too limited.

Fx are pretty expensive process wise, I would suggest using an image as a work around. Svg would work fairly well in this case.

Even better might be the ability to apply changes to the svg at runtime.

Applying a blur to a stroke is basically one line of code there.

Ashley would that be a feasible feature request?

I'm quite disappointed in the effects I've tried so far (except the water shader), because they are all advertised along with the rest of the features, and for the most part they are the same old well established effects I've been using for 10 years plus in various Adobe products: (glow, emboss, blur etc).

These effects run in real-time at high framerates. Image editing tools run effects offline so the performance doesn't matter. I think being able to do Photoshop-style effects in realtime with GPU acceleration is a pretty awesome feature.

The effects compositor is super complicated, as described in my two-part blog on it: part 1, part 2. This makes it difficult to change. It's also very difficult to do certain effects like blurs - and glows are actually a variant of a blur - due to the complexity of the effect compositor; the limitations of how GPU shader programs are written (providing only limited capabilities that are the small set of things GPUs are good at); and the difficulty in implementing them in a high-performance manner without hammering GPU memory bandwidth, which usually involves additional steps in the compositor to adjust the resolution during effect processing (which is another very complicated change to what is already by far the most complicated part of Construct). So, easier said than done! I think we actually provide a pretty good selection of effects built-in, there are more on the addon exchange, and the addon SDK also lets you write your own.

Cool, thanks for the explanation. I will check out those blogs.

From what it sounds like I may have been fooled by the superficial similarity to Flash effects, which also run in a browser and have the same parameters.

In case of the glows and blurs I don't know how hard it would be to change the scale of the intensity to something pixel based, so users could go as big as they want and live with the performance implications. (There may be cases where it's ok to have one very impressive but expensive glow in certain moments)

I understand we're coming from two different ends. I'll admit straight away that artists always want more control and don't have the technical knowledge of what's possible and what poses a bigger challenge than might be obvious.

But in my experience that's a healthy discussion to have, sometimes it can push some boundaries, sometimes it doesn't. That's OK. ;)

I read the blog posts now. They were quite interesting.

They also kind of answered another question I had on my mind, Which is why there is no multiply blend mode available.

I wasn’t aware of the fact that it renders differently from add.

I played around with the screen and blur effects after stumbling across a tutorial about it and I think it’s pretty cool how easy it is to blur part of the background.

(Even though I had to apply the effect twice at a 100 percent to get the result I wanted. So again I think If allowing higher max values would be possible that would be great...

Would you be able to comment on the Flash effects and how they relate to Construct’s effects? I’d be curious to know.