Ashley's Forum Posts

  • We have not removed any feedback ourselves from the Steam page for Construct 2, and I doubt that Valve have either unless they were cleaning up entire spam/bot/abusive user accounts. Occasionally, users remove their own posts after we help them to resolve any issues they were having.

  • Do you have benchmarks to back that up? As thehen said, we generally find low-power devices are CPU-bound, not GPU-bound. GPUs are very well optimised for things like downscaling, and with mipmaps they do it with very good quality. We also support memory management to avoid running out of memory, so even devices with 512MB of RAM can get by with a well-designed game. Unless you want a huge game to run on a low-powered Android handset (which the CPU probably couldn't handle anyway), then it seems like drawing multiple sets of artwork is just a waste of time and unnecessary bloat to the size of the game.

  • I'm afraid we cannot issue Steam refunds since Valve handle all payments. If you want to transfer to the standalone version you should request a refund from Steam and then purchase again directly from us. Again, both versions are absolutely identical in terms of features, except in how they handle licensing, which is a mandatory requirement imposed by Valve and is the same for all software listed on the Steam store.

    We previously had a stability issue that affected a minority of users; we worked to address it and we believe the issue was fixed. AFAIK this is the first case of stability issues on the Steam version we've heard of since r152. The most common cause of stability issues are buggy graphics card drivers. It's also possible the problem is caused by Steam - have you tried disabling features like the "in-game community"?

  • I'm sorry if we haven't been able to immediately respond to any support emails - there are only two of us who look at emails and we've both been having some time off over the holidays. We should have announced this before taking the time off, so my apologies. If it is urgent you can contact me directly at ashleyivo@scirra.com.

    We provide a free edition of Construct 2 on both Steam and directly from our site so you can test out the features and see how it works, and make sure it works smoothly. For the vast majority of our customers we understand Construct 2 is pretty stable, but in some circumstances buggy graphics card drivers can cause crashes. There's not much we can do about that since it's the graphics card vendor who has written broken code, not us.

    All content on Steam - the entire catalogue of games and apps - are tied to Steam and require Steam to be running for the game or app to run. This is normal for all Steam content and is enforced by Valve. However if you don't use Steam, it's a good reason to buy it directly from us instead of from Steam. Since Valve handle all authentication and payment for games and apps on the Steam store, I'm afraid we also cannot help with any refund requests - they will have to go via Valve.

    I'd encourage everyone to try out the Free edition before thinking about making a purchase - that's what it's there for and giving it a try for a few days before buying should hopefully avoid any surprises.

    Edit: I'd also add the Steam version is absolutely identical to the one available from our site in terms of features - it's only the licensing that is different and handled via Steam instead of our usual license file. You can also get beta releases with the Steam version as described here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/227240/discussions/0/810923021602340037/

  • iframes work fine. It should clear memory within seconds, not minutes. It should interact with the page just fine.

  • Android devices cover all manner of pixel ratios. Just a handful of devices in our office cover 1.0, 1.3, 1.5, 2.0, 2.24, and 3.0. Surely you're not going to create different artwork for every possible value? I'd recommend just designing for the highest resolution you want and let C2 scale it.

  • The handful of devices in our office have pixel ratios of 1.0, 1.3, 1.5, 2.0, 2.24, and 3. Any pixel ratio value is possible, and on Android you get a really wide selection. In light of this I don't think it makes any sense at all to try and target one particular pixel ratio.

  • Changing the URL of the iframe, or removing the iframe entirely, will remove all the memory the game uses. Since Javascript is a garbage-collected language it's possible it doesn't all disappear immediately. You might need to wait for it to get cleaned up.

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  • Removing the canvas element doesn't remove all the memory allocations made by the game engine in Javascript. It's designed to be used in an iframe, there's no good way to clean up the whole engine otherwise.

  • You could also use 'Pick Nth'. 'Pick instance 0' will pick the first instance involved in the collision, and 'Pick instance 1' will pick the second.

  • The manual that ships with Construct 2 is up-to-date. I think the OP is talking about the 'Download manual' link on the manual site. I'll look in to getting that updated, it's probably just an oversight.

  • Oh, and IntelRobert - are the Chromium assets compressed in Crosswalk? I know for Windows you can get special executable packers which basically compress the contents of an EXE and then decompress it and run it on startup. It can make the startup time take longer, but done right it should only need to be done once on first run and could save several MB of space.

  • Personally I think the filesize is a tradeoff worth making. It's the same deal as node-webkit really: there is additional file size, but you get a full feature-complete high-performance modern browser engine to run your game. If you really want to you can still use CocoonJS, but then you will have to deal with its various problems and unsupported features.

    The Google Play filesize limit does make the space you've got for your game assets tighter, but then hopefully we can solve that with a remote loader.

    In the long-term future, Google are moving towards a Chromium-powered webview built-in to Android. This would allow the best of both worlds: no size overhead, and a great browser engine. However it's a way off being as useful as Crosswalk is right now - the webview in KitKat is missing WebGL, Web Audio, and even hardware acceleration (!), plus updates are still tied to the OS version (so the version of Chromium could get out of date). Google have plans to fix all of that, and it is on the horizon, but it's likely to be years before a version of Android with all that has wide market share. Until then Crosswalk is the best engine we're going to get for Android native apps.

  • Is it the same across all browsers? Which browsers have you tried?

    It may be that your graphics card is known to have security/stability issues, and has reverted to software rendering, so it's not even using the graphics card. In Chrome you can go to chrome://gpu to check what the status of hardware acceleration is.

    Also, if you are making a minimal test project, note that if nothing moves or changes then the screen is not redrawn. So you will artificially get 60 FPS because it's not actually rendering anything. As soon as things start moving/changing, it will be rendering the screen and you'll get a real framerate measurement.

    If you share your .capx we can take a look and try it on our own systems. On a high end desktop it should be possible to get thousands of objects on-screen at once.

  • I wouldn't use crop mode. It's not really that useful, since it leaves you to solve problems like this by yourself. If you use one of the other fullscreen modes, everything gets scaled for you.