Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Input problems are a minor problem that can be relatively straightforwardly solved. That's not an argument for an EXE exporter! By default Construct 2 blocks the key press actions in the browser if there are keyboard events for it. So if you want to prevent scrolling add some empty 'on arrow key pressed' and 'on spacebar pressed'. That fixes the keyboard scrolling issue - we've automatically done that on the arcade which is why it doesn't scroll. Also, for accidental selections, the canvas uses the onselectstart="return false;" attribute, which prevents you being able to accidentally select the canvas. If you accidentally select other things on the page, you can easily prevent this by adding that attribute to the other elements. You can even add it to the body tag which prevents anything in the entire page being selected (but that might be annoying for the user). Alternatively fullscreen-in-browser games never have these problems.

    So input isn't because HTML5 sucks nor is it impossible to fix and therefore we must have an EXE exporter; it's just a difference in the technology and if you know how to use it you can get it working exactly like you want.

    Of course an EXE exporter won't come soon! I've been trying to convey just how busy we are - at times we've both been working 14 hour days for long stretches of time. I think you don't really understand how insane it would be for us to try and take on another huge project like the EXE exporter right now. It has to be pushed back out of pure practicality.

    The editor is an EXE for a number of reasons, the main one being: the editor is literally orders of magnitude more complex than a game and that makes it much more painful to make in HTML5. If you're seeing pain points in HTML5, imagine those times ten for an editor in a browser. We think it's an interesting idea but HTML5 really isn't ready for that yet - but it's ready for games which are in comparison a lot simpler. Then there's other points like licensing, the tools we're familiar with, etc.

    This thread is 9 pages long and still nobody's persuaded me anything that an EXE does better other than slightly better performance. HTML5 introduces some features that are very different to the "usual" web that most people are familiar with. The people designing HTML5 are deliberately designing it to be able to mimic native apps but in a browser. There are some quirks and differences (like the scrolling issue) but they are all solvable, or will be solved, since the tech is still being actively developed. An EXE exporter would be useful for high-performance demanding games, but there really is nothing else it does better for games! I know it takes getting some used to because it's a radical idea, but I really think it's true. HTML5 is better for you too, because way more people can and will play your game.

  • FireLight, I think you read too much in to my post. I didn't have too much frustration with developing the Classic runtime - I think we actually did a really good job. I think I'm actually more aware than most of what EXEs do well and badly against HTML5. HTML5 wins easily though. I disagree with all your additional EXE advantages you put as well:

    1) HTML5 only needs time to replace Flash, and it will. So supporting Flash is supporting a sinking ship. Also, a URL is a better shortcut to a game than anything else!

    2) If a user won't download a 10mb HTML5 game, I doubt they'll download a 10mb EXE either. And if you don't have hosting for a HTML5 game, where will you host your EXE?

    3) You're wrong, HTML5 games work fine without WebGL - they just fall back to the slightly slower Canvas 2D renderer. So WebGL is nice to have but not strictly necessary. Also, Microsoft just added identical features to WebGL in Silverlight 5, so I think they were just making up those security scares to give WebGL a bad name... total propaganda.

    4) Construct 2 obfuscates games by default on export.

    5) You can also make apps in Construct 2 - we just haven't got all the features Classic has, for the same reason as before. HTML5 is also still in development itself, and it is being designed to get better at system tasks too. For example, there's a whole file system API in the works for HTML5, and it's all done more securely than EXEs.

    And of course we don't have time right now anyway :)

    Maybe it's my turn to read too much in to your post, but you seem to think running a game in a browser is a disadvantage. I think it's an advantage. It makes it way easier to get to the game. The more hurdles you put in the way of the user and the game, the fewer people will play it - you'll lose players at every hurdle. Compare:

    HTML5 game: visit webpage -> now playing game

    EXE game: visit webpage -> manually download EXE -> manually launch EXE -> browser security prompt -> operating system security prompt -> won't run if not on supported OS -> now playing game

    For this reason I think it is better to have apps run in the browser than as downloads. I think it's old fashioned to have to go and download a separate app and run it for a specific OS. Games and apps of the future will run in a browser, and that's a good thing - they'll be accessible to far more people, and a lot more people will actually bother to run them. I think the technology makes EXEs almost completely redundant, except where extreme performance is necessary, which is still the only advantage I'm persuaded of for EXE games.

  • I'm not sure what you mean. Can you post a .capx?

  • — - yikes! Your project has 'every tick - preload' and loads a tonne of audio files every tick! Browsers have pretty fragile audio support at the moment and code like that ("please download 40mb of audio files 60 times a second") is exactly what seems to break the browser completely. I've spent a while debugging it but I can't find anything I can do to make this code work, it just seems to choke the browser.

    I tried making it only preload on start of layout, but it didn't help - I think preloading everything on startup is enough to choke the browser. Why do you want to do that anyway? It'll just waste bandwidth, since you got the user to download everything even if they just want to play 1 track. This is exactly the situation you *don't* want to preload anything, streaming on demand from the server is just fine.

    Anyway if you delete all those preloads it seems to work. I've tried improving stability for preload, but I couldn't fix it completely with all those preloads on, and I have the feeling it's a browser problem. So I think the workaround is just to delete all the preloads, which makes more sense anyway.

    Yann: I don't think I've ever seen the MoonShield .capx file - can you send it to me with repro steps for what's broken?

  • What was the name of the PNG file and what was wrong with it? As I said I'd like to be able to prevent this happening again in future...

    • Post link icon

    Free with no adverts is asking too much really. You can't get quality hosting for free!

    I'd really just pay for the most basic package for some hosting company, it shouldn't cost significantly more than the domain name and then you really do get quality ad-free hosting.

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  • Which browser plugin, out of interest? The context menu is blocked using ordinary javascript (oncontextmenu="return false;"), nothing special.

  • Nope, your correctly blocks right click for me in Chrome, Firefox and IE. Maybe you have some browser plugins that are breaking it?

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  • I can't reproduce this at all, the latest build never shows context menus in any mode for me. Maybe you can post your .capx file?

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Ashley

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