Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Executables on Linux are specified by an executable file permission rather than using any specific file extension.

    You can run it from the terminal. IIRC Linux supports desktop shortcuts but last I checked these only work with absolute paths, so Construct can't auto-generate that as it doesn't know where in storage the files will be extracted. I think you'd have to make an installer or something to put the right desktop files in. It might have also varied depending on the distribution or window manager. I think it was kind of a mess last I looked in to it...

  • Without more information I can only guess, and I would guess your graphics drivers are broken or too old and so you're getting software rendering. Visit chrome://gpu in Chrome to check the status of that. And try updating your graphics drivers.

  • All software has to deal with backwards compatibility considerations, including libraries and frameworks. In many cases it's very easy to change something, but will break a huge amount of things dating back many years, causing on-going problems for lots of users for years to come. If it's that disruptive, normally the conclusion is it's not worth the trouble. As I said, this affects all software - imagine Windows removing support for Win32 apps in favour of only .NET apps. It would be absolute chaos and they'd be forced to reverse the change, even if you could prove .NET apps were far superior in various ways. Microsoft can foresee this, so they're unlikely to ever make such a radical change, even if it would make the product much better. So in that situation they're also stuck with a system that is maybe not ideal, but is better than causing a massive amount of disruption.

    One of the big mistakes with C2 was people could modify the plugins and behaviors. This might seem like a useful thing to be able to do, but it caused awful, awful compatibility problems. It was a total nightmare. In some cases you couldn't even open the same project in two different versions of C2 if you had modified addons. If you did a fresh install of C2 maybe your old projects would no longer open. We could not offer any kind of support at all, on the forum, by email, or in bug reports, if anyone had changed so much as a single line of code in C2, since they could easily have broken things themselves. A bunch of people went ahead and did it anyway and then got upset at the consequences and ended up begging us in support to fix all the problems they ended up with, such as corrupt projects, and so sometimes we got dragged in to supporting them anyway. It was so bad that this is absolutely categorically not an option for C3.

  • You can post whatever you want on the new suggestions platform. Only duplicates on the same platform will be merged. The idea is to keep it focused on things people still want and are willing to re-submit and vote on again.

    You will make it even harder for us to vote, yay.

    I get the impression I won't be able to persuade you, but the aim is not to make it harder to vote - it should be equally easy to make a vote on the new platform - but to reduce the amount of ideas and votes you can make, in order to force you to focus on just the very most important things, since we're too small a team to do more than the couple of very most important things anyway.

  • I just checked, and... I was wrong, Sprite(N).X does index within IID ignoring all the picked instances. Oops.

    I think that is the wrong decision and the feature should not work like that, but it's probably too late to change now for backwards compatibility reasons. This is kind of a mess. I'd rather not touch it, and rather not add any more features that extend the mistake any further.

  • This is not to do with the signalling server, it's to do with the peer-to-peer connections between devices. See the section on connectivity in the multiplayer tutorial.

  • We have to work in the constraints of the platform we use, and they don't let us limit the number of submissions someone can make. So I thought we would give people 10 votes and state an official policy that ideas with zero votes will not be considered, in order to discourage any one user from inundating us with loads of suggestions.

    I do want to make people choose with a limited vote count. If you have 50 votes, you can vote on 40 things that aren't really that important but you kinda like, and 10 things that really matter. Given our limited resources and how many suggestions we face, I want to force people to think carefully and only choose the top 10 things that really matter to them. So then every vote counts and we get a better impression of what people really really want, rather than a bunch of popular nice-to-haves. Features that make something impossible become possible are usually more worthwhile than features that make something already possible a bit easier, so I think this would help focus attention on the former.

    I went through the minor suggestions category and most of them weren't minor. They were either actually more significant projects, or were unclear enough that it would take at least a fair bit of discussion about the idea, the motives, the alternatives, and how it would really work, that the discussion alone means it's not a quick thing to do. This pretty much confirms in my mind that it's not really useful for anyone to categorise something as a "minor suggestion" - it's rare that it really is quick, and most of the time it's much more complicated than anyone imagines. This is another reason I think we should limit votes, since the idea you can vote on a big pile of minor suggestions that are quick and easy is wrong, since chances are all those votes are actually going on big projects, complicated or unclear ideas, or things that will turn up unexpected complications during development.

    I think I'm going to have to just make a decision and go with it, so some time in the next few weeks I'll look in to setting up a brand-new suggestions platform to run for 6 months from scratch, probably from June to the end of the year, with limited votes. I'll try to make sure the old one is still accessible but read-only, since that seems better than deleting loads of ideas and discussion, and we might want to be able to reference back to it even after starting over. I know that maybe not everyone will like it, but I think there's a chance it could actually work much better overall. Let's treat it as a bit of an experiment and see how it goes. If everyone really hates it at the end of the 6 month period we can always try something else, we don't have to stick to one approach forever.

  • I think reddit or Trello will meet the same fate of being inundated with an impossible amount of work, if there's no limit on the number of suggestions you can post. To avoid the same fate there has to be some kind of restriction on how many posts people can make or how long they remain for.

    We don't really do any formal long-term planning ourselves, so I don't want to share a roadmap that either doesn't specify anything in particular, or commit to ideas that we later delay or cancel and then have to deal with all the backlash from users who were expecting it. As it is we have a lot of flexibility which is good for us as a team, especially since we can easily respond to changing circumstances, and it avoids risking broken promises to our community.

    I just went through a bunch of suggestions on the existing platform. I really struggle to know what to respond to some suggestions. A lot fall in to a kind of "I guess we could do that, I don't really know how hard it'd really be, and there's a lot of other ideas with a similar number of votes and I'm not sure what the rationale for picking this over all the others would be". I don't think it would be useful to say that. A lot of responses are also not simply a statement but a question clarifying some aspect or asking for more details, and often become fairly long and involved discussions with complicated trade-offs that need careful consideration. It also took ages and I got through only a fraction of the total number of ideas on there, and I'd need to repeat much of that, going over the same ideas, to examine answers to questions and continue discussions. I really think we should make it clear that we can't be expected to provide a response to every idea. I think we have to let the votes speak for themselves and leave the responsibility of making clear and detailed proposals up to the user who submits it. All too often it takes a lot of questioning and clarification to be able to conclude anything.

    Also I wish there was some way we could encourage people to vote on small and quick ideas first, since it would be much easier to get those done and more rewarding for people to see their votes turn in to action. But as I said, it's hard for anyone to know what the easy ideas really are, and I suspect most votes are going in to the major features anyway - I guess they're more exciting.

  • It shouldn't matter to you if the top post has 20 votes or 20000 votes, if it's on top. But it matters to us!

    I think it's better to force people to choose. It gives us a smaller set of things to focus on, which is what we need to do to prevent the problem of being inundated with suggestions.

    I mean that "minor suggestions" category should be for small things that make our experience with C3 easier.

    I don't know what you expected, but in my mind the category was originally created for things that were meant to be quick for us to implement. But as I said, this is not really possible to tell in practice.

    After 2 months you quickly review the ideas (maybe just the titles) to discard those that already exist or not possible. Then you open voting for one week.

    I think we're going in circles again... reviewing a whole set of ideas is a lot of admin work, and we often can't actually usefully comment on them without at least partially implementing them. This kind of thing significantly increases the workload on us, and the goal here is to reduce the workload on us. So I'd rather come up with a system that we weren't required to comment on everything. Maybe just the top few ideas or something.

    I'm not sure a limited voting period is that useful either - I suspect lots of users come and go, and having just say one or two weeks to accept votes means a lot of passer-by type users won't be counted. I'd rather leave the voting open for the whole period, so people have plenty of time to consider their choices and make votes when it suits them.

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  • I think the discussion is starting to go in circles. For example people are asking again why we can't comment on every suggestion - I've already explained how much work that is and how often we're simply wrong about our guesses.

    If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So I don't think unlimited votes is a good idea, since you don't actually have to choose what's most important to you, you can just throw votes to everything that might be even slightly useful. I know it might feel like an impossible choice, but I want to make people choose their top requests, so we really focus on what is the absolutely most wanted things. Remember that the votes will be accumulated across hundreds or thousands of users, so one person's votes probably aren't going to influence a decision alone anyway. It's also a measure to prevent inundating us with work. If you can only submit at most 10 ideas, then you can't post a mountain of work that's impossible for us to do.

    We'll have a clear notice on the suggestion tracker in the couple of weeks before the reset so everyone knows it's coming. If an idea is lost or submitted late or not voted on much, there's always the next phase.

    I'm sceptical about stating a specific vote count at which we guarantee a response. Ballot stuffing already happens to some extent on the voting platform, and I think if we said "we will respond to all suggestions with 20 votes", people will regularly ballot-stuff their ideas to force us to respond. I think a better way would be to say we will try to respond to the top 20 ideas or so. Although as I've said before, it's very hard to give a better response than "maybe easy" or "maybe hard".

    I believe "Minor suggestions" category was misunderstood from the start. It's not about ideas which are easy for you to implement (we can't possibly know that), it should be for ideas which are minor for us.

    Users don't know what will be quick to do. What I've kept saying in this thread, is neither do we, even though we're experienced programmers looking at our own codebase. Since nobody can tell in advance whether something will take 15 minutes, or descend in to a weeks-long nightmare of breakage and problems, then I don't think it's worth pretending that we know what is or isn't a major or minor idea.

    I almost regret starting this thread. If as a result of it you cut the votes limit from 25 to 10 and remove "minor suggestions", this will be a huge step back to what we had 3-4 years ago.

    Please try to see things from our point of view. Sitting here, the problem is that people have absolutely inundated us with an impossible mountain of work. If we are to prevent that happening again, we need some kind of restrictions or limitations. If we don't have any such restrictions, I would fully expect things to end in exactly the same way - with an impossible mountain of work.

  • This is incredibly inefficient and wastes loads of system resources. If every app did it, your system would slow to a crawl. Why not just use the Date plugin to check how much time passed?

  • I missed a few posts while writing that, so I'd add: the problem with polls is they are only things we think of. Going back to the scene graph suggestion again, I'm not sure we'd have ever added that to a poll. It was user submitted and loads of other people voted on it, and we spotted that, realised the importance, and started the work. If we only do polls with pre-approved features, we might miss that kind of thing, even if lots of people want it. How would everyone show that an idea we're not considering is important to them? Voting on the suggestions platform is meant to be the answer to that.

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Ashley

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