Will the manual for construct 3 be feature complete&detailed

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  • I would like to see a manual that really goes into extensive depth about what all the expressions are,

    how the entire engine works ,etc so that I don't have to guess my way through the engine to some extent.

    The manual for construct 2 was okay but it didn't really answer all my questions when I was making a prototype video game

    I had to ask around once and that can get quite tedious if you are thinking big picture games?.

  • Hello and sorry but I think your approach and your question are surprising! However, and according perhaps to your level, I must admit to understand them. But you know, the purpose of a manual is to be a features and usages reference, not to take people by the hand until creating their project in their place. Personally, I presume it will be very close but better than the current one, and Scirra will also make it as complete and clear as possible, like they have always done (look a bit on the side of the competition, the bar still remains relatively high). This is one reason why I never really agreed with the famous adage "create your games without knowing how to code", it takes serious experience, and it also comes with curiosity but above all with hard work.

  • Sebastien

    Well.. If I was going to do a manual Id have liked it to be as complete as possible

    to the point that you'd literally have all your answers to 90% of questions

    no matter how complex to some extent like how can I store information of a character who has been

    changing scenes several times I mean I do know how to do that you just have one file shared between one object and exchange information

    or something like that but for more bigger questions it seems limiting to not even have a more vivid picture of what everything can do

    in the construct 3 and even 2 engine if you know what I mean that's what I'm talking about.

    I agree that making games requires knowledge of describing real world energy

    but I think it could be done with much more simpler terminology then is currently been established

    sin and cosine is nothing to a nasayer you could say that about the word rotate but

    once you know rotate and then you could do RotateX , RotateY instead of all this weird sin and cosine mumbo jumbo

    it would be much simpler but that's why I am not a game programmer because I do not agree with the current

    way that programming languages and game libraries ,etc have been designed clearly not from ingenious visionary that's for shore.

    So I'm working towards construct now as my game development friendship.

  • Well.. If I was going to do a manual Id have liked it to be as complete as possible

    to the point that you'd literally have all your answers to 90% of questions

    I get your point, but this is what tutorials and the forums are for. You can't expect a manual to answer 90% of all the possible questions. The manual's purpose is to provide reference on how the engine works. For the past 4-5 years, I found the manual exceptionally useful. It only missed minimal information, but then the forums had those.

  • We intend for the content to work like this:

    Manual - essentially a detailed description of what individual feature does (but with some overviews/other content, e.g. a summary of keyboard shortcuts)

    Tutorials - how to bring together sets of features to achieve useful results

    I don't think tutorial-type content belongs in the manual.

    Also I prefer not to go in to extreme detail in the manual, such as to describe the particular algorithms we use, because it changes regularly. Community knowledge takes years to build up, and I can easily imagine everyone still saying "feature X works like Y" when we changed it to "Z" a year ago. So we try to limit the manual to saying what things do, but not how. From time to time we do blogs going in to a lot of the detail around "how", but then even that changes often - for example there's some old blog posts about the collision cells optimisation, and it's probably 20% wrong by now. The details change a lot over time. Blogs kind of suit that actually because they're more a snapshot of "here's how it works at this particular point in time", rather than a long-standing manual entry.

  • How do I find out how it works exactly at the time I need it when I have dozens of examples that are out of date?

    It's like syntax, If I don't know the exact way code is to be written, and there are no examples of how it works currently, then knowing what it's supposed to do is useless.

    Sure Construct handles most of that for you, but it also depends on third party services extensively.

  • I believe the C2 manual to be complete.

    The manual provides information on the API and the tools C2 gives you.

    How you combine these tools and apply them is up to you and requires prototyping and research, however such things should not be in a manual. There are examples, tutorials, the forums, reddit and YouTube for that.

    What you ask for depends a lot on individual preference and style and there is a thousand ways to achieve the same result with the given tools. A best practice thread in the community might be what you are after.

  • I don't think what the Op is asking and requesting has nothing to do with (take peoples by the hands). when you target people with the slogan "Make games no programming needed" obviously you have to expect that some of those people buying your software had nothing to do with any programming or any skills for game development, so you will expect that they will start from 0, meaning that they will have no prior experience and ask the most basic question and they will need as much as help and examples as possible to keep them going in the right direction especially with something complex like game development as they are many skills involve like programming, math, etc...and how to implement them in construct 2, is like your learning any topic from the beginning you always need some tutorials at the beginning plus references,then once you get the basics you can be able to start experimenting by yourself. I think the problem here is that are two types of people here on the forum, the ones that already know programming before they started to use construct 2 which they will have sufficient just with official manual, and the none programming people like me wich is totally different world meaning like we will need more detailed explanations and examples many many examples. It's easy to forget once you are experienced in any topic that you was beginner too and you had to go through all the learning journey too, lets no forget that and try to understand and help each other. At the end of the day like I said before this is good for the company because the fastest the people learn the more successful games you will see, so meaning more publicity for C2 , C3.

  • The more detailed you can make your official documentation the better (for anything). Tutorials and the like should be supplemental to any official documentation.

  • What the hell I made an elaborate reply and it won't show up on this forum thread -_-?

    Okay maybe this will work :

    Ashley I can totally understand the how's not being described from a programmatic perspective in detail in some cases it can lead to some

    rather difficult issues of legality and that the accuracy is variable at best,

    I am talking about the how's of the actual process of doing certain complex trivial tasks

    like storing a action dictionary "a bunch of words that have actions or functions attached in their value" these action dictionaries

    can then be used too simulate the very basics of true to life conversation in a NPC AI once the player types in a particular word that matches

    with the word in the action dictionary .

    If the detail in the manual is not full fledged expanded on in depth at least with the what's and where's explaining their possible uses

    ,their purpose of being their ,etc it can lead to some real hulk fist radiant punches beyond the concrete walls of the sensual office lol.

    ^^ those kind of complex problems ^^

    newt I agree extensively when their's not many tutorials on the subject you are after

    and some tool in the construct engine is missing a kind of elaboration on various uses

    or the simplest way to implement it ,etc that can lead to some difficult problem solving

    which could even make it impossible to finish that task from my point of view.

    5Type When I bought construct 2 it was quite clunky I was really in the unknown

    and Id read the manual and get very frustrated with the non-expanded on detail

    Of the various references and explanations in the manual I actually had to ask

    someone how to scale a sprite accurately on both x and y cartisean cordinates while pressing the up arrow

    because the setSize or whatever it was scaling function was doing all kinds of weird too fast and flipping scaling .

    tarek2 Exactly I am saying that the manual needs more expanding on , more simplicity I've actually built prototype basic

    2D or 3D Game Engines with C++ & OpenGL2 , OpenGL3.3 with GLSL 3.3 ,etc and used many different programming languages like

    Java with LibGDX , Lua with Love2D , Ruby with Gosu , C++ with many different apis from SFML to GDI , Python with PyGame ,etc "literally"

    but I didn't like programming because it was so flawed to me and that's why I chose to use someone elses engine

    with much simpler tools because I realized I am a Game Designer not a mathematician of extensive degrees can do some maths

    know how kind of to write Quaternions:

    double x = sin(xval * M_PI/80) / -1;   
    double y = sin(yval * M_PI/80) / -1; 
    double z = sin(zval * M_PI/80) / -1;
    double w = cos(wval * M_PI/80) / -1;[/code:2bzda0k9]
    
    Probably should have that in a struct called Quaternion 
    but still! you get my point. 
    
    

    Burvey exactly documentation is 40ish% of your popularity amount in my opinion .[/p] [/p] Please don't destroy me : < .

  • Someone deleted posts from this thread as well for some reason.

  • : < the unfairness of the universe....

    Well I am an extrovert so if anyone wants to message me

    go ahead.

  • Not aware of anyone deleting posts ITT! PHPBB sometimes plays up might be that.

  • Tom

    Ahh pew pew PHPBB

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  • I'm sure it wasn't mods, as there would be no reason for them to delete posts from here. Hopefully my post didn't infer that, as that was never my intent.

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