Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • At launch, the C3 debugger will be the same as the C2 debugger.

    * Run line by line (event number by event number)

    You can already do that in the C2 debugger.

  • It was added in r242 back in January.

  • We don't store any of your project data on our servers. The only cloud services we will initially support are Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. You also don't have to use them - you can keep all your content locally like with C2 - and C3 itself can work offline too. This blog post covers it in more detail.

  • We did a bit of maintenance today. Sorry for the trouble, it should be back to normal service now.

  • I quite like using the colored icons to identify each section and having an 'Add' shortcut in the header. I'll see if I can work that in somewhere.

  • The SDK is architected such that while you could in theory do any manipulation to the app, using anything outside of the official SDK APIs will likely just break things. In other words while it's technically possible to do anything, it's not useful unless you work with the SDK.

  • Please report bugs to the Bugs forum following all the guidelines.

  • The current spritesheeting method has worked fine for some of our large test games - but as I say if there are any issues we can make some changes. We'll see how it goes in the public beta.

    Jank has in the past been a major concern for a lot of users. So we have carefully designed the engine to pre-load all the textures it needs based on what's placed on the layout. If you don't care about jank, we still have to design the engine for people who do.

  • It's a shortcoming of spritesheets that you can only load entire spritesheets in to memory. In the extreme case there would be all content in a single sprite sheet, and you therefore load all content in to memory at once. However spritesheets themselves save memory by packing multiple images together, and they tend to be fragmented over a set of different spritesheets anyway. For example one of the demo games we test with is very large, and still uses 100 sprite sheets, which allows for quite a lot of granularity around what is loaded.

    TBH unless your player animations are absolutely huge with loads of frames, splitting things out in to separate objects is probably a micro-optimisation that doesn't make much difference. It also can jank the game as it loads textures mid-frame if the object isn't already preloaded by being placed on the layout. And currently the engine doesn't release textures until the end of the layout, so the peak memory usage will be the same.

    I don't think the spritesheet system will cause any memory issues, but if there are cases where it causes a problem then we can look in to figuring out how to address that. If we had to do that, I'd try to avoid any kind of manual configuration, the groupings can probably be determined by which objects are used together on layouts.

  • AFAIK, PhoneGap Build has identical support to the XDK. So you can just use PhoneGap Build now. They are both based on Cordova.

    The main reason we postponed our own build system is the XDK did the job for free. It's a shame they are retracting a free service, but since nobody ever paid for it, it's not really that surprising.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • It could be enabled, but even just enabling it comes with some downsides:

    • currently we reduce rendering overhead by omitting Z positions - they're all assumed to be 0. Sending Z positions of 0 with every sprite is extra data and a bit more performance overhead.
    • there's no depth buffer, since we don't need it. Enabling it might make GPUs do more work to redundantly check the depth buffer, when it has no effect, adding a bit more performance overhead.
    • in the past I researched new rendering features like front-to-back rendering, which made use of the depth buffer for optimisation. Using it for 3D could significantly complicate future optimisations along the same lines.

    Having said that, we could possibly have it enabled per layer (so you could for example enable 3D on just one layer, then all 3D content has to appear on that - all other layers are still 2D and are treated as underlay/overlays). But I think it's odd to add a checkbox that says "Enable 3D" when nothing in the editor actually uses that!

  • Looks like Safari doesn't support it yet, sorry. Apple need to add support. We really avoid cordova plugins wherever possible because it can be extremely difficult to guarantee 100% compatibility with the browser-standard features, and usually browser vendors add it eventually anyway, making it very hard work which is ultimately wasted.

Ashley's avatar

Ashley

Early Adopter

Member since 21 May, 2007

Twitter
Ashley has 1,776,087 followers

Connect with Ashley

Trophy Case

  • Jupiter Mission Supports Gordon's mission to Jupiter
  • Forum Contributor Made 100 posts in the forums
  • Forum Patron Made 500 posts in the forums
  • Forum Hero Made 1,000 posts in the forums
  • Forum Wizard Made 5,000 posts in the forums
  • Forum Unicorn Made 10,000 posts in the forums
  • Forum Mega Brain Made 20,000 posts in the forums
  • x126
    Coach One of your tutorials has over 1,000 readers
  • x74
    Educator One of your tutorials has over 10,000 readers
  • x5
    Teacher One of your tutorials has over 100,000 readers
  • Sensei One of your tutorials has over 1,000,000 readers
  • Regular Visitor Visited Construct.net 7 days in a row
  • Steady Visitor Visited Construct.net 30 days in a row
  • RTFM Read the fabulous manual
  • x42
    Great Comment One of your comments gets 3 upvotes
  • Email Verified

Progress

32/44
How to earn trophies

Blogs