Download Construct 3 Built-in Addons?

TheRealDannyyy - I don't think you understand, that in engineering terms, undocumented features exist for a reason. As I mentioned in that other thread often it allows us to move quickly and make radical changes without the burden of backwards-compatibility dragging things down. So some features will remain undocumented for that reason. Again, all products have undocumented features, and experienced engineers know not to rely on them or at least not to expect any support for them - this is not controversial or new. We're actually in general more closely aligning ourselves with the industry standard approach. Outside of that though, we will make sure we document as much as possible.

TheRealDannyyy - I don't think you understand, that in engineering terms, undocumented features exist for a reason. As I mentioned in that other thread often it allows us to move quickly and make radical changes without the burden of backwards-compatibility dragging things down. So some features will remain undocumented for that reason. Again, all products have undocumented features, and experienced engineers know not to rely on them or at least not to expect any support for them - this is not controversial or new. We're actually in general more closely aligning ourselves with the industry standard approach. Outside of that though, we will make sure we document as much as possible.

I do understand but I don't know why you would hide cutting-edge features, despite the things you've mentioned.

My point is to expose those features and let JS-Dev's deal with depreciation or similar breaking changes. They should be responsible for using cutting-edge features and all future changes which might break their addons. It's kind of like Scirra using cutting-edge web technology in Construct 3, something changes, you have to adapt to it.

My point is to expose those features and let JS-Dev's deal with depreciation or similar breaking changes.

Generally they won't, though. Often they're not professional developers; sometimes they suddenly disappear forever and stop maintaining their plugins. Then if we break third-party plugins people get upset at us. Browser developers also still go to great lengths to maintain backwards compatibility and avoid unnecessary breakage, and even in the few cases they do break things, we're paid, full-time professional developers and can deal with it.

Wow this post blew up more than I intended it too Sorry I haven't been posting.

A few points:

Why did I want to edit built in functionality?

I wanted to send custom data to the multiplayer signalling server (an edited one, based off of the paid server you can buy in the store). I accomplished this and am happy

This will always be possible for motivated devs

You can get the source for the plugins by looking at the sources via chrome while you are previewing a game. With that you can cobble together whatever you need. Even if this is minified, a really motived dev can still do as they wish...

I agree with Ashley

Ashley is totally right. In my experience there are TONNES of plugins in the forums with broken links / features & are "dead". Mostly because the person who made is just doing other things & has moved on. Also people like to find someone to blame, and if the 3rd party dev isn't available...

Im fine with the way things are now. I think the remaining problems are:

• Having some larger sample/open source plugins for people to learn from.
• Something to make setting up C3 plugins faster. Currently there is a lot of cutting and pasting names, many files etc. It's for the better, but I think we could make something that would speeds up the process.

The above is just all my opinion, but I think everything is moving in the right direction, and with some more samples and tutorials itl be great!

Just worth noting that the SDK templates includes this gem:

// ... see other behaviors for example implementations ...[/code:prwhhitk]

:/

Ashley

Many of the awesome plugins we have would not have been possible without such a preview of plugin code: off the top of my head, I imagine that Canvas, jcw_Trace and most of RexRainbow's plugins would not have been possible without other c2 plugins being human-readable, but I could be wrong.... I feel that this restriction will sacrifice the creative, just to avoid giving support where I think you shouldn't be giving support anyway.

I'm just gonna chime in and say that, at least for my plugin, this is true. It would have been much more difficult to make my trace plugin without the availability of the runtime and plugin sources, and I may have given up on it altogether.

And many of the more creative plugins were created to fill gaps in the official plugin list. For example, raycasts were asked for many times and you never saw the need; IIRC you stated that we should just use a sprite (! - what about collision point and normals etc?), then jcw_Trace came out.

To add on to this, a prime example of why you need a trace/raycast plugin. Lets say I'm making a platformer, and the terrain is made of various objects with unique collision polygons. Throw in a few different types of rotating platforms from various other 2D platformers to make it interesting. I want to adjust the player's horizontal speed based on how steep the slope they are walking on is, and force them to slide down if it is too steep. How do you propose to solve this without traces/raycasts? You might try to be a smartass about it, and say that every walkable edge should be its own object with a variable set on it so you can know what angle the slope is at, but that's a mess to design a level with (believe me, I tried). When you start making the level design that complicated, it kinda defeats the purpose of using a tool like Construct 2.

The simple fact is, nothing will be easier or more CPU efficient than just using a proper trace/raycast to find out the normal of the surface the player is walking on.

You can still make addons. There will be samples to help you get started. It's not like we're closing off third-party development entirely. Some people seem to be acting as if we're doing that. We're not. It's not the end of the world.

[quote:1qiwvofa]The simple fact is, nothing will be easier or more CPU efficient than just using a proper trace/raycast to find out the normal of the surface the player is walking on.

Shouldn´t it be sort of possible bullet behavior? I mean yeah maybe not as CPU efficient but you can continously shoot invisible sprites down from the player while he is on ground, have them bounce off and get the grounds normal by comparing the initial angle (90) with the angle after the bounce. At least in theory, I haven´t tried it. You can destroy them directly after the bounce so even if you shoot every tick there shouldn´t be a huge amount of sprites. You probably can even get away with shooting it like every 3 ticks if you want to optimize.

Anyway, I recently tinkered around with the SDK creating https://www.construct.net/at/make-games ... 7/utc-time It´s the first time I ever made a plugin and I´m rather noobish with JS. From that experience I can just say...

[quote:1qiwvofa]- Having some larger sample/open source plugins for people to learn from.

• Something to make setting up C3 plugins faster. Currently there is a lot of cutting and pasting names, many files etc. It's for the better, but I think we could make something that would speeds up the process.

... basically this.

Especially the initial setup (UPDATING PLUGIN IDENTIFIERS) gave me some trouble and I found the documentation not sufficient/confusing. I could swear I changed everything but as soon as I changed the plugin ID it stopped working. I don´t remember exactly what ended up solving it. Same goes for the ACEs. In particular, I needed a "combo" dropdown thingy but the ACEs documentation doesn´t show how exactly this has to be defined. There´s just a lot of {[]} going on and it´s confusing if you only get told

[quote:1qiwvofa]"combo" — a dropdown list. Items must be specified with the "items" property.

I ended up downloading another addon and check it´s code to figure it out.

So from my experience: More/better samples, better documentation and it would be awesome to have an easy method for the initial setup of ID, names and references.