Ashley's Forum Posts

  • (Moved to C3 forum)

    "QuotaExceededError" most likely means your system has run out of storage space. Chrome uses a quota system which limits web page's access to disk so you may still get this with some free space available. If you increase the free space it should start working again, so try freeing up some space on your hard drive.

    At the moment running out of storage causes C3 to crash; it shouldn't, but it's hard to develop the feature.

    This issue tracks making Construct 3 more robust in the face of storage failures.

  • This is 100% untrue blaming-shifting nonsense.

    Citation needed.

    My statement is based on three things:

    1) webglstats.com measures a wide range of devices and produces an overall support number of 96% (notwithstanding a minor recent bump). This matches data I've seen from our own measurements, and also matches what is implied from browser vendors talking about it.

    2) The architecture of WebGL is basically a thin layer on top of OpenGL calls. So it works the same as a native engine. Once the calls reach hardware the GPU performance is identical. I am strictly talking about GPU performance here; if you have a game which is slow due to CPU performance, that is unrelated to what I am stating here. To work out if your game is CPU or GPU bound, you will need to make measurements and consider the data carefully, which I've not seen any evidence of many people doing before they start complaining about what they have assumed the problem is.

    3) Many, many times I have been shouted down by someone who claims HTML5 is slow and doesn't believe this technical matter of poor quality drivers and GPU blacklisting, sometimes even accusing me of being deliberately deceptive. Then I ask for their game or some kind of evidence of why it's slow. Then I investigate. Then it turns out it was GPU blacklisting all along. If you are in the unlucky 4% it sucks, but that's not a fair representation of the wider hardware ecosystem.

    Again, the irony is it's not HTML5 that is immature - it's the graphics drivers, which are native technology. As I repeatedly have to say to people who don't seem to believe this, graphics drivers are widely accepted to be terrible and can even completely ruin game launches. Here's two links to back this up:

    Batman: Arkham Knight had such poor PC performance it virtually ruined the launch - it ran fine on console, where the drivers are good quality and predictable

    "How to delay your indie game" specifically calls out struggling with GPU drivers: "Despite claiming to, their drivers just don’t properly implement the OpenGL specifications... Then a new OSX update will hit and everything will change again, yet at the same time I will need to still cater for the previous releases and older machines... it’s unbearable... Would I support Mac again? No."

    In technology, knowing who to really blame is a surprisingly difficult and nuanced problem. It's rarely as obvious as it seems. For example lots of people, even engineers, blame the browser for bloated web pages.

    I am so tired of this that unless you produce any evidence to the contrary, I will just ignore any further complaints. I would actually be super interested to see any evidence to the contrary, because I never do. And if you don't provide any, I would kindly ask that you take a less accusatory approach to the issue.

  • As far as I've ever been able to tell, every case of significant performance issues in a browser, NW.js or on mobile, is GPU blacklisting. That is approximately 4% of devices in the world which have such terrible GPU drivers the browser won't use it (since it causes crashes/severe glitches) and reverts to software rendering.

    I have seen scant evidence of any other significant performance issues for a long time now, despite always asking and investigating.

    The irony is graphics drivers are native technology. Using different technologies just makes you vulnerable to the crashes/severe glitches on those 4% of devices with poor quality drivers.

    For the 96% of devices, WebGL is native performance. It's bottlenecked on the hardware.

  • It's probably best to file any feature suggestions on the tracker so other users can add votes to show support.

  • What about the Ubuntu store for desktops?

    Doesn't the NW.js export cover that?

    • Post link icon

    I have already moved on to other alternatives for my game making hobbies. They cost much less, and are more feature rich. They do not include the event system

    You can use whichever tool you like, but Construct is aimed at non-coders. So if you're intending to code, it's probably not the right tool for you.

    [quote:3h53zzqb]The construct brand is heavily regarded as a hobby tool because it lacks strongly perceived features that are vital.

    We are a small company with limited resources. Lots of people are pointing out the things that are missing, or that they perceive as needing improvement.

    The main reason we haven't addressed all those things already is because we can't. There are only so many of us and so many hours in a working day.

    I can't quite get my head round how many people have an approach like "X, Y and Z are missing, and they should also charge less". Naturally customers will always want more for less, that's just how business works. But trying to both sustain the business, maintain the products for thousands of existing users, and address all these major areas that people want to see worked on, with a small team solely funded by the acquisition of new users, is pretty much impossible. This is the main reason I find this frustrating: to me these feel like impossible demands, everyone insisting we should do a whole range of improvements, while simultaneously arguing for less sustainable business models.

    I don't expect anyone to change their mind over this, but I think it's an undervalued point: if you want to see these big changes to the product, we're going to need a way to scale up. And some of the different models and revenue ideas thrown around here could well force us to scale down instead, making these features everyone wants a more distant prospect. You can't have it all: there has to be a tradeoff somewhere.

    [quote:3h53zzqb]Lashing out against these feature requests and ideas, is directly lowing your product's perception and potential income.

    At no point have I meant to lash out against anyone, although I will admit this has been frustrating at times. I apologise if I have at any point come across as lashing out.

    [quote:3h53zzqb]I fail to understand why you are not acknowledging that this is a lockout on the project.

    My main objection is trying to make it sound like you are completely locked out and all your artwork and media is "held hostage" until you pay again. That's not the case. I think this is a really important point: if your subscription expires and you decide to go with another tool, you can. You're not locked out and prevented from doing that until you pay again. So I don't like the term "lockout", unless it's qualified like "editing lock".

    [quote:3h53zzqb]Now you are asking that we just trust you, because you are going to bring all kinds of great new features.

    ...

    So please -- essentially, PRE-ORDER our product -- we will deliver - we promise.

    No, don't buy the product - or any product - based on promises. We sell the product based on what is available now, and you should only buy it because it has features that you need right now. We only talk about future plans because lots of people want to know them. I would not recommend anyone makes a purchase decision based on future plans: there is too much uncertainty around if, when or how it will work.

    This is easy advice to give because I think both C2 and C3 have a great set of features already.

    [quote:3h53zzqb]3D? I mean really?

    OK, I should have said 2.5D. Like Construct Classic's Z elevation, 3D box object, that kind of thing.

    [quote:3h53zzqb]It seems to me a more stable income would be expanding your customer base -- not extorting the current base for rent.

    Again, I object to the term "extorting". This is not extortion. It's a product for sale. You don't have to buy it if you don't like it. It's as simple as that.

  • That would circumvent one of the key reasons we ask people to buy Construct.

  • Platforms like BB10, Tizen and Ubuntu Phone are pretty much completely dead by now, as far as I can tell.

    The actual usage of export platforms is almost entirely shared between the exporters we already support, and the rest have vanishingly small usage. We'd like to trim dead or unused platforms from C3 where possible. I think we'll bring back the Chrome Web Store exporter because it had slightly less negligible usage and partly because it's pretty simple, but other than that I think it depends on user demand.

  • Addon testing has been a little cumbersome in Construct 3, since you previously had to keep re-packaging a .c3addon file, and in some cases clear browser storage, to test an update to your addon. To fix this r25 adds a new addon testing mode which loads your addon from a local web server. This means C3 always loads the latest version of your addon files, making it much more convenient and quicker to iterate.

    The steps to enable this mode are described in the SDK documentation in the testing developer addons section.

  • Check the browser console for errors. I really can't help any more from just a screenshot.

  • If you want to run something on a device with an ARM chip, you can simply use the browser. Also pretty much every iOS and Android device uses an ARM chip, so we already have broad support for ARM devices.

    However I suspect you're not really asking about that, it sounds like you just want to run on a Raspberry Pi-like device. You can still do that with the browser, but the problem is the early state of development of the OpenGL driver on the Raspberry Pi. Using a framework like NW.js, even if it can be ported to Raspberry Pi, won't magically fix that. It will be the same driver with the same problems.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads
  • We have a blog post coming up covering this.

    • Post link icon

    >

    > but yeah you are right, the clock thing is easy to cheat, unless you have a user login system - which you do.

    >

    Exactly what I was thinking.

    I'm not sure why I have to point this out, but you can sign up new accounts for free, which entirely circumvents that.

    • Post link icon

    We're going in circles again. We covered all this in the other thread.

    I genuinely think it's a perfectly fair deal. It's a fantastic product and it's still pretty cheap: you get all features and exporters, including a build system, for less than the cost of a build system alone (PhoneGap Build). Nobody is completely locked out of their project; it just disables some features (not even all of them; you can still edit layouts and such). We have already talked about how we plan to have a maintenance subscription to help people who just need to do light maintenance so they don't have to go for a full subscription to make changes after their subscription expires.

    Since I honestly think this is a fair and reasonable deal, at this point I suspect some people's motivation is only to whip up as much of a frenzy on the forum as possible. If you really think this is an unfair deal and you don't like it, you don't have to buy it. You can go somewhere else. But you might end up with a lesser product that ends up costing more for the same features. It's up to you.

    If your only goal is to bring up the same old points we've discussed previously in order to whip up a frenzy, I'm afraid this thread will probably end up locked too.

  • Nintendo have not told us a single thing about Switch support or whether it will support the NWF. It would be best if everyone asks Nintendo so they can see the demand for it.