Ashley's Forum Posts

  • You do not have permission to view this post

  • You do not have permission to view this post

  • You do not have permission to view this post

  • 1. Are you asking if it's OK to use lots of instances of the same sprite? That's pretty much what the manual was talking about. It doesn't matter which object types you use, lots of instances will cause a slowdown, period.

    2. Text box is a form control. It allows the user to type in some text. Text is just some text drawn on the screen - it's not interactive. If you want to display text, use Text. If you want the user to type in text, use Text Box.

    3. We don't support setting the framerate, because it's not something you should do.

  • Just a quick note, about Ashley last comment, but Internet Explorer is also automatically and silently updated since the beginning of this year, capped by the OS limitations (IE8 on XP, 9 on Vista and 7) if I'm not mistaken.

    That's true, but organisations tend to install Windows Updates when it suits them, i.e. very rarely and years between. So that tends to mean they're lagging behind even the current Windows Updates.

  • I don't think WebStorage is supported in CocoonJS, I'll ask them if they can add support for it.

    PhoneGap is generally too slow for games - I don't think it would solve much even if we added support for storage there. It ought to work with WebStorage in PhoneGap anyway.

  • You do not have permission to view this post

  • We don't want to encourage anyone to stay on old browsers. All the exciting new features being added like gamepad support, fullscreen support, high-resolution timers, hardware-accelerated rendering, javascript engines fast enough to run physics simulations and particle effects, generational/concurrent garbage collectors for smoothness, Web Audio API, WebGL shaders, real-time audio and video streaming/peer-to-peer calls over the web (currently in development by browser makers), page visibility features (which also enables pausing the game when hidden), new form control types, Web Fonts, sandboxed iframes for secure game hosting, and other features which we don't currently use but might in future (mouse lock, features from CSS3 or the new DOM additions)... they're only in the IE9+, Firefox 4+ and Chrome generation of browsers.

    Firefox and Chrome release updates every 6 weeks now, often adding more features too. The web is moving forwards fast. We're trying to keep Construct 2 up with the bleeding edge. Being at the forefront of technology is important enough to us that if an organisation does not want to install a free improved browser to support Construct 2, then we won't slow ourselves down by looking back.

    By insisting we're also increasing pressure to these organisations to upgrade. Old, outdated browsers hold back the development of the web - just think of the complete nightmare that was IE6, and how it continued (or even continues!) to be a problem over ten years after its release! Note Firefox and Chrome automatically and silently upgrade to prevent this problem. So we want to strongly encourage people to use modern browsers, too. It's sort of "being cruel to be kind" in my eyes, because it is actually better for them too, even if they don't want it (these browsers are a lot more secure as well for example). And I am confident that despite possible short term gains, in the long term it is more beneficial for our business to insist on this: I wouldn't want anyone to still be using IE7 in 5 years time because we let them get away with using it...

  • You do not have permission to view this post

  • FYI r90 does not report plugin errors, because it is a stable release and most of the error checking is not included. You should develop plugins with beta releases which do additional checking to make sure your plugins are working properly.

  • I have also seen slight stuttering in Firefox. I think Firefox is more than fast enough, but it has problems with V-syncing. That's when it synchronises drawing with the monitor display rate, so perhaps there's a problem and it's missing every other V-sync or something like that. That would make it technically be achieving 60 fps, but only physically displaying 30 fps. Hopefully they'll fix that in a future release - both Chrome and IE9 seem perfect.

  • The string "<test>Success</test>" is not a complete XML document, it's just a tag on its own, so I would not expect it to load properly in all browsers. You should make sure you use valid and complete XML documents, which start with "<?xml ...".

  • We get a lot of reports like this. It is most likely due to a bug in your driver, which is made by ATI (now AMD), not us, so we can't fix it. Updating your driver may help, otherwise complain to your graphics card maker because they sold you something that doesn't work with modern software.

  • Yeah, it will slice each frame in to a separate PNG-32 file. Save as a folder project and browse the files to see what it's doing.

  • Remember the estimate is only a guess: the only way to know for real is to actually export your project, which will run various CPU intensive compression algorithms and compact the project size down. More info in this blog post. The estimate is pretty crude since it doesn't do all that work.

    When you import images, regardless of the format of the image, C2 stores it in the project as PNG-32. This is what the estimated size measures, so there should be no difference between importing a PNG-32, a PNG-8 or a JPEG on the estimated size.

    You can set a different export format in the image editor. It's still PNG-32, but will be recompresed to either PNG-8 or JPEG upon exporting if you use this option. It's not automatically set, so if you import a JPEG it will still export a PNG-32 unless you click the image format button and change it to JPEG.

    The export format is not currently taken in to account in the estimated size, but for the next build I've changed it: PNG-8 will be estimated to be half the size, and JPEG will be estimated to be a quarter the size. Again those are pretty arbitrary guesses, so you'd have to export to know for sure.

    Hope that helps!