Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Isn't this what the comments feature does?

  • Scope is designed to work like it does in programming languages, and in fact actually helps you to organise variables too. If you put a variable in a group (or sub-event) it is only accessible to events in that group. So in many cases you can move a variable to just the section of events that uses it, and it avoids clogging up the project with more global variables. If you enable the "static" option for local variables then you get a locally scoped variable that remembers its value like a global variable. So you can organise variables so they're only scoped where they're used and the top-level global variables are just the few variables that truly need to be accessed by events all over the project.

  • What is the point of the website remembering what version the user is on?

    So it can give you a more useful message. If you were on r130, and then you reload C3 for the first time in a while, it can say something like "you were on r130, and you got updated to r146". Now you know to check all the intervening release notes, if you want to stay up to date with all changes since then.

    If there was a person that wanted to stay on r142. They would nav to editor.construct.net, get a message that the new version is release 142.3, then they would need to go to the address bar and type out editor.construct.net/r142 - then remember to go to that address every time they use C3.

    The approach is based on the principle that most users will simply want to use the latest stable release, so it's geared towards that. The typical user will just type in/visit editor.construct.net, and if you do that, you're always using the latest stable release, which seems like a sensible default.

    It's also our goal to make sure there's never a good reason to stick with old versions. Every update fixes a lot of bugs and we strive to maintain excellent backwards-compatibility. For the typical user, not being updated causes more problems than it solves - they typically end up running in to bugs we've already fixed (and sometimes reporting them, where all we can do is point out that we already fixed it, and they are causing problems for themselves by staying on old versions). So staying up-to-date is an important part of the UX, so people always get the best-quality software currently available. I think if we give everyone an opt-out of updates, rather than applying them automatically, it will result in a worse UX as a greater number of users run in to problems that have already been fixed. Modern software like Chrome adopts a similar approach of silent auto-updates for the same reason.

    Of course software development isn't perfect, so sometimes people want to roll back - and you can do so simply by typing in the version number in the URL.

    I think you've misunderstood how the URLs work, and presumably as a beta user you have more interest in rolling back versions occasionally. This is straightforward, since you can just type the version in the URL. If you visit editor.construct.net you're getting the stability-focused general consumer version. I am pretty confident that is the right approach for the majority of our users. If you opt in to beta releases I think you just need a little awareness of what the URLs mean, and then you can switch between versions at will.

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  • Ashley right, but I didn't realize I was going to the latest stable version. I thought editor.construct.net was just the generic site and it loaded the last one you used.

    No, that URL loads the latest stable release. I think that's the source of the confusion? If you understand that, do the prompts make sense?

    • Post link icon

    The original post looks a lot like automated promotional spam the moderators routinely remove, but it's not particularly clear in this case, so I edited the original post to remove the link to avoid any spam benefit.

  • That prompt appears because it's the first time you're using that version so you might want to check the release notes. So it prompts to ask: do you want to view the release notes? I see that to a different case to a "new version is available" prompt.

    So it does know what version I was using previously. Why can't it prompt me?

    I'm confused what you expect it to prompt you? Previously you were visiting editor.construct.net, and it did prompt you to tell you there was a new beta version available, because you'd chosen that in your settings. It offered options to keep using that version, or switch to the newer version, just like you suggest. When do you think it should prompt you instead and what would it say?

  • If you look in settings, there's an option to translate expressions. So if you want to use the UI in Dutch but see all expressions in English, you can do that by unticking "Translate expressions".

    Since that already gives you a way to see all expressions in English, I'd advise translating all expressions. Besides, the intent is for someone with no knowledge of English at all to be able to use the software, so for that type of user it would be best for no English terms to appear at all (unless they are de-facto terms/"borrow words" in the native language that everybody would understand).

  • You can always make your own performance measurements.

    "Set HSL" sounds like a third-party effect (Construct only has "Adjust HSL"); in both cases the effect runs entirely on the GPU, and they're very good at it, so it will probably be hard to measure a difference either way. The only real difference is any shader using HSL will have to perform HSL-to-RGB conversion at some point, which takes quite a lot of calculations, but the architecture of GPUs generally means they spend so much time waiting for memory access that there's a lot of time to spend doing calculations, so it probably still doesn't make much difference. I guess it might save a bit of power.

  • If it automatically navigated you away, you couldn't intentionally switch from a beta release to a stable release. So it only prompts you to give you the opportunity to stay on the stable release.

    In short:

    editor.construct.net = latest stable

    editor.construct.net/beta = latest beta

    editor.construct.net/rXYZ = specific version

  • Yes, that's what I said it probably is. You're loading the latest stable release, with prompts about beta updates enabled. So every time you load the stable release it tells you there's a newer beta release. It's working correctly according to your settings.

  • Well, if you've opted in to beta updates, then the latest stable release will prompt you about newer beta releases. If you don't want that, opt out of beta update notifications.

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Ashley

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