Construct 2 is awesome, but that's not enough...

Don't get me wrong, I totally like Construct 2. It got me really enthusiastic about building games; in fact so enthusiastic that I was planning to build my own gaming site, where people would play skill games against each other for fun and prizes. After toying with C2 for a couple of months I started building my first serious game. I encountered many problems but most of them were solved by searching through help, the forums or the plugins section. However small bugs just kept adding up: web fonts won't render in the same spot in FF compared to Chrome or IE, stuff running in background tabs in Chrome and Firefox is buggy even when using wallclocktime (I got the timers right after a few tries, but for example it won't execute System > Go to "Layer X" for some reason until tab gets active again) and another thing that I discovered earlier today, IE pops up a warning which if clicked refreshes the window. That is unacceptable when people are playing against each other because it can ruin their experience and my reputation.

Of course, most of these bugs come from the browsers, not from C2 itself, but they show me that HTML5 is still far from being a good tool to develop professional games. Or maybe just not fit for my needs at the moment.

Maybe it's time to go deep into Flash!? Many are saying that Flash is not gonna last much longer, but to me it now looks like they are wrong; offering a sturdy environment that works the same way in all browsers is not something easy to come by these days and Flash does just that.

What is your opinion? What would be your choice for building professional community-oriented games?

Thank you

Mihai

I also stated in another post that HTML5 is cool and is the future but for now the browser issues are not helping it.

I'd like to have the ability to export C2 to .swf. There are many marketplaces where you can sell flash games and make some buck.

Once Awesomium gets fully sorted then that will be a huge step forward. I know it adds a huge amount of size to the final file, but not that big a deal.

Well there are three issues you mention:

• each browser renders text slightly differently, because they all have different rendering engines
• tabs are paused when inactive by design (can you explain more about why this is a problem?)
• an IE bug with a warning

I'd like to know more about the IE issue because we may be able to work around it. If you let us know about issues you encounter, we can either help you solve them or come up with workarounds. I'm also sure there'd be as many, if not more, "annoyances" working in Flash - HTML5 is pretty good these days.

I have tried other game making apps and all off them have issues of some kind.The trick is to find workarounds for these bugs.html5 is quite stable these days.from what i have seen with c2's arcade section ,you can create professional games using c2.

Well valid points but only a fraction of the players will ever experience these relative small nuisances. How about, you just make great games and by the time you have a smash hit and a reputation, these issues are ironed out?:)

Yeah most of that is browsers and html5 fault. C2 is always awesome, but HTML5 is inconstant. It sucks in some areas, lack in others , is good enough in others , is excelent in a few etc. So C2 is totally dependant on HTML5 success. That represents both a big risk and a huge opportunity for C2 , only time will tell.

About Flash, Flash Player is almost dead. But AIR is moving on and it appears to be a pretty nice framework for multiplatform dev. I don't know what to think about AIR really. It owns HTML5 big time in a sense and sucks at the same time since the hopes are on HTML5 not on AIR. It's a complicated and prone to flame wars discussion at the least.

kiyoshi - I actually trialled Adobe AIR a few months ago. They didn't have a GPU accelerated canvas, so the performance was terrible. HTML5 is way, way faster (unless they've changed something since I tried it). So HTML5 is a clear winner as far as I'm concerned. Anything missing GPU acceleration is not much good for games at all!

Afaik the latest versions of AIR got support for stage3d tech so it's hardware accelerated and runs on mobile. It appears they're going all out with AIR for apps and games and leaving Flash Player behind somewhat. I don't know how is the exact performance, but if it runs with hwa on all ios and android it's currently a win over webgl. It's natural since the technology is fully controlled by Adobe unlike WebGL that relies on each target implementing it. Just saying it i'm not Flash fanboy or anything :D I hope WebGL get's the same reach fast.

kiyoshi - both CocoonJS and directCanvas use hardware-accelerated OpenGL on iOS and Android. So I would expect them to be about as fast as Stage3D. WebGL is also sure to come to mobile eventually, and will be equally as fast as Stage3D as well. So I'm not sure it's really an advantage in favour of AIR.

Ashley

Problem #2: if the inactive tab is paused and the game is unable to run normally (it's forced to pause or to skip steps) it may result in a corrupt result which - in case of a duel with cash at stake - might seriously affect the contest holder's reputation

Problem #3: I am unable to replicate the Internet Explorer popup and I don't remember what was it about, but it seems once you choose something it will force a refresh and won't pop up again.

As for Problem #1, it may be a difference between browsers, but that doesn't make the final result any better. One choice would be to make the games unavailable for specific browsers, but from experience I can say people would rather ditch the game than play in a browser they're not comfortable with.

Construct is a really awesome piece of software and it's taking me 3x longer to do the same things in Flash compared to C2, but for now this seems to be the better choice. Large skill gaming websites, such as king.com, are still using Flash for their new games, and they probably do it for a good reason.

The time for HTML5 will come, but not just yet.

I'll have to put my name on the list of people who dream of a swf exporter with C2 :)

Problem #2: if the inactive tab is paused and the game is unable to run normally (it's forced to pause or to skip steps) it may result in a corrupt result which - in case of a duel with cash at stake - might seriously affect the contest holder's reputation

What do you mean by "corrupt result"? It's a useful feature to pause games in inactive tabs to help save CPU and battery on laptops and mobile devices. The game properly resumes from its previous state without any problems, unless there are bugs I'm unaware of. If you want to run a cash competition and you really think that's a deal breaker, I'm happy to say Construct 2 is not the best tool for that job.

If you can reproduce the IE problem, let me know.

Large skill gaming websites, such as king.com, are still using Flash for their new games, and they probably do it for a good reason.

Maybe it's because they're too slow to get with the times! :)

Most (if not all) skill games with cash prizes have a predefined time limit. This also helps against data tampering/hacking. C2 might be not the tool I need now, but it's definitely a great piece of software I'll be keeping an eye on. Hats off to you guys at Scirra and to the entire Construct community.

write a little bit of jquery to hit an amazon or azure webservice to keep time.

Web/mobile development should be moving away from client side stuff anyway. This is why most modern mobile languages force you to use async calls all the time.

Offload your fears to a server, take control.

I wouldn't make a big wall of text, then i would to leave my simple message due to a lot of reasons:

Flash sucks on Mac / Linux computers