I think it depends on the availability of a Windows driver for the Steam Controller - I'm not sure there is one at the moment, and Valve might not be interested in making one if they only want their hardware to work with official Steam games.
We'd like to fix any stuttering - could you post your system information (Windows version, GPU, any console messages in the app) to this forum thread so we could perhaps look into it?
Please report any problems to our issue tracker to make sure we can help.
You can submit requests like this on our feature request tracker: https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-feature-requests
You can have more than 16 lights in a scene - the limitation is only on how many lights are in the viewport at the same time. So you could for example have 100 lights spread across a level, and so long as only 16 are visible at a time everything will work. The light radius is an important option to make sure far away lights don't count.
Can you explain more about what is not working correctly? Construct's fullscreen modes have been supported for years and used by thousands of games and working well as far as we're aware.
Please report any crashes to our issue tracker so we can properly investigate and fix them!
Currently 3D lighting is a built-in feature of the renderer. It is not done using effects, because those run through the effect compositor, which is primarily designed to handle a sequence of 2D effects and has a relatively high performance overhead. So in my view using the effects system as a means to achieve this is something of a hack - it's just that it's currently the main way third-party developers can write custom shaders, but that does not mean it's a well-designed system to handle this.
Making the lighting model extensible can be done, but I think it involves a lot more complexity than you might expect. For example Phong and PBR use different material properties, and other lighting models might use other material properties. So it's not just a matter of writing a shader, it also means defining what the material properties are, having the editor display those custom properties, update shader uniforms accordingly, store the material properties with instance data, handle undo for changes, etc. That's not currently possible with the SDK, so supporting that means developing a range of features to cover that.
For a mostly diffuse texture, doesn't PBR with 0% metallic and 100% roughness basically look the same?
Can you show pictures to illustrate what you mean?
There's already an ambient light setting in Layout Properties.
There's a PluginInfo method SetSupports3DLighting() in this release so third-party addons can opt-in to 3D lighting support (I forgot to add that to the changelog, sorry). Custom geometry can use MeshData and call either copyNormalBuffer() to set a normal buffer, or computeNormalBuffer() to calculate it from vertex positions.
Rendering should not be affected by anything previously drawn - if so it's a bug so please file an issue!
Great interview, really interesting to read about the monthly game project and your process and thinking behind it!
There's still a Line of Sight behavior, it hasn't gone anywhere.
Member since 21 May, 2007
The official blog for all things Construct and Scirra run by our employees!
Wider technology issues from Ashley's perspective.