In theory, previewing in Chrome should be identical to previewing in Awesomium, since they use the same engine. I'd prefer not to add a preview option for EXE if it basically works the same as the Chrome browser. I would also prefer to avoid adding full file I/O options which are not portable, i.e. only work in Awesomium. Browsers are beginning to understand files with various file system APIs appearing in browsers. I think it would be far better to come up with a cross-platform file I/O system which works transparently with both Awesomium and browsers which support file systems. However, that means not using the traditional file I/O, so I'm not sure what that would look like. It probably means unlimited file I/O, but in a sandbox (where the user can only choose files previously saved to the sandbox). This will be looked in to, but I don't have any immediate plans...
File size - Not as much of an issue these days, but it seems a waste especially with needing 3 copies of each sound file in each backup of a game.
Not sure why this is a reason for EXE preview. Only .oggs are exported with Awesomium since it can read them.
aving times - true, saving as a project is faster, but even with a small game it can start to take a bit of a disconcertingly long time when imagining how much longer it would take to save a big game.
Not sure what you mean here, do you mean save times in C2? Why would a new preview option affect this?
reviewing times
Preview times for an EXE are likely to be the same as previewing in Chrome. Classic was slow because it would build a new data file for each preview, as if exporting. C2 now points the browser to the existing project files without copying anything, so even large projects should be fast. I don't see an EXE previewer improving on this.
pdating files - if we want to update a piece of music, we have to go through the process of importing and replacing it each time. If we could have it load from disk, all we need to do is overwrite the file.
If you save your project as a folder, don't you get this already?
ome people want to make EXE-only games - it would be very, very nice to preview directly via the output method they're going to use - no having to wonder if the game is going to work differently via the EXE exporter (bugs in awesomium or such, etc). A lot of bugs are found when testing other stuff in the preview - having to do a whole extra round of testing specifically for the export would be extremely inconvienent, especially for large games like an RPG!
I admit this is probably the best reason for making an EXE previewer. But if we can get it working nearly identically to Chrome, I still think that's a better solution. Hopefully the EXE exporter can literally be Chrome in its own window.
ebstorage issues - as browsers have limits of 2.5 or 5 MB for webstorage...
This is only because browsers operate on the open web. The limit can be removed in Awesomium. I'll check if this is done already or if we need to do something.
hat's worse, is when previewing via a browser, that's 2.5/5 MB shared for ALL games made with construct 2!
The limit, if any, is per-game. However it is most likely any limit can be removed anyway.