Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Hey, check the last section of the new features thread for the situation on that. Chances are there won't be any backwards compatibility.

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  • Well this kills any enthusiasm I had for the project, so much for donating.

    I should have mentioned: obviously if we went closed source and commercial we'd either refund everyone who donated or give them a free license worth more than their donation - we don't want to leave you out in the cold! We appreciate your generosity! There'd be an awkward couple of weeks of transition but it'd be necessary and I think we can do it fairly and without leaving anyone screwed over.

    [quote:388yrlxi]HTML5 would have been the best option as the baseline exporter since the code it generates is pretty much open and relatively unobfuscated, which would allow a good codebase to work on to create new exporters.

    Considering the javascript sources are incredibly difficult to protect since they're just plain-text files, it would probably only be the C++ sources to the DLL that got closed sourced.

    [quote:388yrlxi]Of course the poll is just an empty gesture, I doubt the results of it would sway your opinion one way or another since once a project starts seriously considering going down a closed path it's basically a done deal.

    We don't make decisions solely based on a forum poll but I put it there as a quick way to get overall feedback from everybody, so lurkers can put in their view without having to type out a full "I support this" or "I don't support this". It's still a really useful indication of whether or not a decision we want to make is popular: if it's overwhelmingly popular, we can go ahead, if it's incredibly unpopular, we know that if we go ahead anyway, we probably need to do something or change something to mitigate the unhappiness it could create. So no, we're not going to make this decision solely on a forum poll even if it goes against us, but it's still important information to take in to account.

    ...

    I really hope I can always make time for the project and I have no intentions of ever leaving! But it is true that if we can come this far in our spare time, what could we do if we went full-time?

    It would be amazing if we could go full time solely on donations, but we're simply not big enough to do that yet. It's obviously very kind of people to send money over off their own back, but in practice, the cold truth is this is not remotely enough to cover full-time work. It's a very, very long way from that. To demonstrate this, 0.x was about 250,000 lines of code, worked on for about three years by three people part-time, downloaded 275,000 times so far, and the donations have always been well below ?100/month. Do a bit of math for the wages for three full-timers and you see it's not really making a dent on living cost. And if we went full-time, we can make Construct at least twice as good for everybody - I mean, C2 so far has still been a spare time project - think if it had a full time team behind it! Again, we appreciate the generosity of those who donate, but we're just looking at this in a real-world sense.

    It's been really interesting reading everyone's views and nothing's set in stone so do let me know if you have more thoughts. I honestly don't have a clear pre-determined agenda that I'm following, I'm still trying to figure everything out, and what everyone is saying here is factoring in to that. The situation is just that it'd be best for everyone if we could go fulltime on this (personally it'd be my dream job! I do this all the time anyway), and the fact is, in order to do that, something is going to have to go closed source. We just can't figure out a good commercial business model if it's all open.

  • Sure, it would be nice if you had a mention it was made in C2 somewhere though.

  • It's too early for us to have plugin distribution - try uploading them to dropbox or similar for now.

  • Folks, to be honest, at this time it looks best for us to close-source the editor as well.

    We're discussing all our options behind-the-scenes and there are a tonne of options (like taking royalties on sales of third party exporters) that are impossible with an open source editor. By having any part open-source, our options rapidly dwindle to very few limited choices. We can be an awful lot more flexible with licensing with closed source.

    Obviously this isn't aimed to rip off indie devs, I'm still in favour of a cheap or free indie/personal license. It just means that suppose Google came along and wrote an Android exporter and started selling it - we can ask for royalties (for example - this is not a definite plan). That's a neat possible revenue opportunity and it's just impossible if the editor is open source.

    As far as open-source contributions have gone in 0.x, we've had some cool patches by R0J0hound which is great and we're thankful for. However, in terms of options for making money, this is incredibly limiting, and given that we haven't exactly had hordes of developers battering down our doors demanding to write code for 0.x, it seems a logical move to go closed source.

    Again, not definite and still very much a work in progress, but it's on the cards and we're thinking it over. We don't want to rush in to any decision but I thought I'd let everyone know what we're considering. I guess it wouldn't be popular, but it makes it much more likely that we can really build something great. And the sooner we do it the better, to get ahead of anyone who forks the code already available.

    What are your thoughts? If C2 went closed source but still had a cheap or free edition, would that put you off it? How important is the open source to you?

  • The 'cannot find object expression' appears when the expression name in the AddExpression at edittime does not match the expression name at runtime. For example if your AddExpression adds "GetFoo", then you say exps["GetBar"] = function..., then it looks for "GetFoo" but can't find it.

    In your example it looks like you've deleted a crucial line for some reason. You should have something like this:

    (function()
{
	// This is the line you were missing, it creates a local 'exps' as a reference to the object expressions (this is taken from the Mouse object)
	var exps = cr.plugins.Mouse.prototype.exps;
	
	exps["X"] = function (ret) ...[/code:2myipk7s]

Without that line, you're writing the expression functions to a new global variable called 'exps', so C2 will never find the expression routine.

  • Can you post a .cap of that not working properly on the tracker?

  • In all the object methods, 'this' refers to the current instance, so just do this.now = new Date() etc.

  • Are you checking 'image' is not null? Otherwise AFAIK it'll just draw a white solid fill box. SetTexture and a Quad are all you need to get a texture on the screen though.

    (Note you should always check for NULLs - don't assume GetParamFirstInstance returns an instance - what if there are no instances?)

  • I suppose, but with good SDK documentation, the source to the exporter isn't important - and that's a fairly minor disadvantage outweighed by some solid advantages, IMO.

  • Thanks for the encouragement

    I thought opengl was badly implemented/supported on windows 7 (even more bad than on XP). I am still on XP, but that's what I've read at some point on the net. Have you ran tests, or something of the like to make sure ?

    I develop C2 on Windows 7 and haven't had any problems. It's really up to the graphics card makers to make good quality OpenGL drivers for it to work well, and it's very much in their interest to do so. Actually, so far I think it'd been working better than the old DirectX editor (no D3DX install needed), so I'm guessing you just heard rumour.

  • Anyone had any new problems with this update? Considering marking it stable and sending it out via auto-update.

  • I don't see any reason this will affect plugins. What are you worried about?

  • are you referring to the source of the exporter or the exporter itself here?

    The source code would be closed-source (proprietary). The licenses refer to how the released exporter is given away, not the source code itself, which is private to us.

    Back in time there was some legal actions threaten from CT about re-use of their coding ideas (ACE for instance)

    I don't believe there's any issue here, that all appears to have blown over. Besides, ideas aren't copyrightable - try putting IE9 and Chrome side by side.

  • I'm sorry if you're frustrated by the late notice, but it's done now. I thought it would be better to have something to show with the announcement - rather than "we won't finish 0.x, and haven't got anything else interesting to show you right now". Why would anyone believe C2 was going to be better if they couldn't see for themselves?