Ashley's Forum Posts

  • No, while we will continue to maintain Construct 2 for the foreseeable future we have no plans to add any more major features to Construct 2.

  • When it suspends it has to stop playing audio otherwise the audio processing is still working, which is exactly what uses power.

  • The build service is just one aspect of many that I picked as an example. There's a number of other aspects like the Scirra Arcade, multiplayer signalling, the hosting of C3 itself, other services we haven't announced yet, and other services we'd like to add in future. Also there's the aspect that we don't charge per-exporter, and don't do regular major version updates which we charge again for, so the fact we're still maintaining the software, fixing bugs and adding often significant new features for customers who bought it one-off maybe 5 years ago is also an on-going expense and service we provide. We've never done the pick-and-choose thing (e.g. you get all exporters bundled in the basic license, whereas many other companies charge you repeatedly for each), and similarly we just want to put everything in the one option.

  • Oh right, that way. I guess it's an interesting idea.

  • I wonder if any of the c2 dev team use a browser based code editor.

    Heh, yes actually, my daily driver is VS Code which is built on Electron. It's a fantastic editor. I last used Notepad++ which is a native editor, but I hardly use that any more, VS Code is much better.

    As for perpetual licenses, I don't think it's really a change over the C2 model, it just postpones it. We could similarly end up working to maintain customers who last paid years ago, and it's doubly painful if they're doing things like using the app build service heavily which has on-going running costs.

    I am in favour of something for users who have previously had a subscription and want to return for some quick maintenance on an old project without going in for a full renewal. We're looking in to our options for that. I am aware this is a significant consideration for many before they start using it.

  • Concave Collision Polygons

    This is already supported in C2!

  • The only officially supported option that is still maintained is cordova.

  • Instance variables are already static, because they don't reset every tick.

  • Construct 2's Audio plugin specifically suspends and resumes the audio context to save battery life, and it looks like the suspend and resume events are firing correctly.

    I'm not sure what kind of browser comes on the Samsung Gear S3, but maybe it doesn't support suspending the audio context? If you check in the browser console on the device if AudioContext.prototype.suspend is available, that would identify the issue. If the browser doesn't support suspending or resuming the audio context, the problem is with the browser, not C2 - C2 will use these to optimise battery life if they are available, but if they're not available there's not much choice other than to leave the context running idle in the background.

  • I really don't think it's as obvious as you assume: Construct 2 is relatively unique in having much deeper and far more entangled relationships between objects. For example you can have a Sprite that belongs to three families, inheriting different behaviors and instance variables from them, combining them with its own, and then have events in different kinds of objects referencing those behaviors and variables across multiple event sheets. This means actions like deleting an instance variable have far-reaching effects, including removing a significant number of events, conditions or actions. So it only takes one or two actions to completely ruin a project, and then maybe you can't undo that because it would conflict with something someone else did. I don't think something like a video editor or Google Docs has such deep and far-reaching references as that. For something like a document, you can pretty much treat the whole thing as a single linear sequence, which massively simplifies the problem.

    And if your solution is to show a popup, what does that popup say? "Would you like to delete Bob's work"? What about what Bob wants? How does that solve the conflict?

    I think the permissions idea where you can say lock a layout and only do level design is much more feasible. But then why not just use existing source control mechanisms? Is all this really better than that?

  • Your streamlined example is simply returning 404 not found for the files. Look in the browser console.

  • I think full-blown collaboration is a really difficult feature to use in practice. This is my example of how tricky it can be for users:

    Alice and Bob are both editing the same project

    Alice adds a Sprite

    Bob adds an event for that Sprite

    Alice presses undo

    What happens now? Does the carpet get yanked out under Bob and some of his work just vanishes? Or is Alice simply unable to undo - so a key feature of the editor is disabled? I'm not convinced there is a good answer to situations like this, and it seems like collaboration would quickly break down in to a nightmare of either being unable to change what you want, or trampling over other people's work.

    There's already a great way to organise collaborated projects - source control does it well, and you can already use that.

  • Construct 2 is severely limited in this regard, but Construct 3 will be even more limiting for desktop users BECAUSE it is browser based.

    Actually, Construct 3's multi-monitor support is better than Construct 2's. You can do things like open a layout view on a different monitor. Construct 2 could not do that. We hinted at the windowing support in this screenshot from one of the first blogs. We're going to cover this in a bit more detail in one of our future blog posts.

    Lots of people are making statements like this which totally underestimate what you can do with a browser. We're aiming to prove that it can equal, and even exceed, native apps. It's not really possible to keep repeating this with the hundreds of posts we get every day, and people get sick of hearing me say the same things repeatedly anyway, so really the big thing is to wait for the public beta and see for yourself how it does.

    FWIW, we are still focused on indie devs and making it a better tool for them - it's still probably the largest segment of our userbase. We are interested in education as well though, so we're trying to expand there at the same time.

  • In Construct 2 you can already collapse sub-events and event groups, is that what you mean? You can do the same in C3.

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  • The core of C3 is a custom-built framework we designed and developed ourselves, because we didn't think any other Javascript libraries out there were suitable. It's a pretty interesting part of the development, I'm hoping on doing some tech blogs about it in future.