Construct 3 r450

Notes

Construct 3 was first released in 2017, around 8 years ago. In order to ensure we can keep improving Construct in the long term, it's important to eventually retire features that are deprecated, have been superseded, or have otherwise been holding it back. This release is a major compatibility milestone as we are retiring a number of legacy features, most notably support for legacy (SDK v1) addons which have been responsible for on-going compatibility disasters, and also the NW.js exporter since it has been replaced by our own desktop export options for some time now. Other legacy features that have also been removed include support for 32-bit platforms on Windows and Linux (even the Raspberry Pi is 64-bit now), the legacy "file" protocols for Android and iOS exports, and the legacy "flat" export file structure. All of these features will remain supported in the r449 LTS releases, which will continue to be supported for another 18 months.

We've now also enabled the WebGPU renderer by default as it is on the cusp of broad support across all major browsers and platforms, and as of this release, all known bugs with the WebGPU renderer have been fixed. This ensures projects take advantage of the latest web graphics technology, based on the Vulkan, DirectX 12 and Metal generation of APIs. This includes the editor, which now renders the Layout View with WebGPU as well (where supported). This blog post has more details about the improvements with WebGPU, and there are a number of other improvements since that was published which we'll cover in another blog soon. As another change to modernize the default settings, Construct now also enables the AVIF image format by default for lossy images on export, as it is broadly supported and very good at reducing download sizes.

Construct's coding capabilities have also steadily advanced over the years, and the latest updates with the new code editor and built-in TypeScript support make it a competitive option for coding games too. To encourage use of Construct as a coding tool, we're removing the free edition limits on lines of code. That means you can write as much code as you like in a project without a subscription!

Other improvements in this beta include further updates for Construct Game Services, and two new examples. There's also a redesigned text layout engine designed to significantly improve performance in dynamic cases such as constantly scaling or re-wrapping a large amount of text - but keep an eye out in case anything works differently to before. It's a big release with a lot of significant changes so bear with us if things go wrong, but happy testing!