Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • As I said, I don't really want to get sucked in to making hacky changes because WINE doesn't support something. C3 should bring full official support for Linux. NW.js relies on localhost because it's a simple and elegant way to get NW preview to work: it's just treated like another browser.

  • Doesn't NW.js work? I didn't think it ran a server and could just load files from disk.

    Outside of that, you can't really run projects from disk, because browsers have very strict security rules for files from disk which generally prevent it from starting up the game. Besides, I don't really want to get sucked in to hacking in features just to work around incomplete features in WINE, better that they fix it their end.

  • Video encoding is a lot more complex and specialist than audio encoding as well, which is another reason you might want to find your own tools to do the encoding. Also while PCM WAV is a de-facto standard for uncompressed audio, I'm not aware that there's an equivalent for video. Uncompressed files are so huge that I think everyone mainly deals in compressed formats (perhaps at very high quality settings). So while audio typically involves just encoding, video could involve transcoding, which is more complicated and lossy. Throw patent-encumbered formats in to the mix, and the fact Windows doesn't have a built-in video encoder like it has for audio, and a wide range of exotic formats across platforms, and you find it's a real minefield. That's why it's not supported the same as with audio.

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    Just a quick update on the NW.js/greenworks situation:

    I've been testing NW.js 0.13.0-alpha4 (and alpha5 is already out, looks like their release cycle is finally speeding up). It's based on Chrome 45 (46 now with alpha5 I think) and the jank issue looks to be finally fixed - every frame comes within 0.1ms of v-sync on my Windows dev machine running sbperftest. However there have been some backwards-incompatible changes going from NW.js 0.12 to 0.13, and changes to the Construct 2 build are necessary for it to export. So the next beta should come with an official NW.js 0.13-alpha5 (or newer) support, but you'll need that beta or newer to export with it. Either that release or the next I'll review Greenworks integration, and hopefully be able to ship it in the C2 editor at last.

    Just to review why this has taken so long in case some of you weren't aware: NW.js has been on a slower release cycle than Chrome for a while, generally releasing only once every few months. Chrome 38 had a bug that basically broke v-sync scheduling and made everything janky. Google eventually fixed it a couple of versions later, but NW.js got their next update in just before the fix, so it's been affected by the bug for a lot longer than Chrome. Then on top of that their 0.13 release has involved significantly reworking how the architecture works, which has meant a longer development time than usual.

    The good news: NW.js is nearly there with the 0.13 release, and the release cycle seems to be speeding up again (they've mentioned on the email list about how they have made big improvements to the build system and reduced build times a lot). Although the next update will require a new version of C2, we've still had NW.js updates separated from C2 for a while now, so we can update them independently and avoid the problem with earlier builds where you could end up stuck with a broken version. And once Greenworks is integrated that should make Steam publishing a bit easier. The next update will be a huge jump in the Chrome version - from 0.10.5 to 0.13 covers Chrome 35 to Chrome 46, with tons of bug fixes, performance improvements, and new or improved features (including better WebRTC compatibility). So hopefully things will be a lot better from the next build onwards.

  • We know lots of developers do use the Intel XDK, PhoneGap Build and other services successfully, but that's not to say the publishing workflow couldn't be smoother. It's unlikely we'll make significant changes in the C2 time scale since most of our efforts are going in to C3 right now, but we're aware of the difficulty some people face with publishing, so we'll be looking in to what we can do to improve this for the future. We do want to avoid pitfalls like locking users to a specific version, and it's a little more complicated than the NW.js model since Cordova & app store publishing is more involved than just copy-pasting the NW.js files around. Given we're still relatively small and there are free options available we hadn't prioritised this, but we are well aware of this kind of feedback coming up on the forum and we'll be thinking about how to make it better for C3.

  • Is the performance the same in the Chrome browser on the device?

    What does it say if you browse to chrome://gpu in the Chrome browser on the device?

    GPU blacklisting is common, especially on old Android devices like the kind that would still be running Jelly Bean. It's an Android ecosystem problem.

  • Unfortunately SVG is not currently supported in C2. PNGs are the only way to go.

  • Long animations do eat up a lot of memory - you have to just make them use fewer or smaller frames to reduce that, or use something else entirely like Spriter animations.

    The estimated memory usage is for the largest layout, since C2 only loads a single layout at a time to reduce the peak memory usage. It's also based almost entirely on the image memory, so it should be regarded as a minimum - sounds, logic and other OS and browser features will go on top of that.

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  • Russian and Brazilian Portugese are two of the top non-English languages on the Scirra site last I checked, so we will likely be prioritising specifically those languages when we work on translation. However we can't give much more specifics right now and C3 is still a long way off.

  • I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "integrate Cordova in to Construct". The runtime already integrates with Cordova by using Cordova-specific features where available. I could copy-paste a bunch of Cordova files in to the Construct installer, but then specific C2 releases ship with specific Cordova versions, which slows down the whole update process. A nice thing about the fact Cordova is not directly integrated is whenever you go to a build service like the XDK or PhoneGap Build, you get the latest and greatest Cordova version with all the latest bug fixes and features - not whatever version happened to ship with r216 or whatever C2 version you happen to be using at that time.

    As has always been our policy, we do not obligate ourselves to support third party plugins in any way. If there are specific features you would like to see integrated as official features, please do suggest them.

    I guess we could run our own build system, but that is very time-consuming, difficult and expensive to run, and currently the Intel XDK provides that for free. So I don't see much point in us doing that either. I know there are several build systems to choose from, but I see that as a good thing: it protects you from any one service shutting down/hiking prices/otherwise making themselves not useful. We've also been criticised in the past for relying too much on one service, so...

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Ashley

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