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  • I don't understand it either.

    A free version doesn't cost Scirra much, but brings in lots of value, even free users help Scirra big time.

    Free users make the community bigger, a big community in itself is a valuable "feature" people look for when picking an engine, a bigger community creates more advertising for Construct, not only because it's bigger now, but because people can actually fully use it ...you could make a YouTube tutorial video about Construct 3 right now, and people can use it, but you always have to stay in the limited test version restrictions if you want to actually share it with the audience, so it results in only shallow tutorials because more in depth videos don't get many views. You can't say, hey let's use Construct 3 in this game jam, because everyone needs a sub otherwise you constantly run into limits. Even if you make that work, it's not fun and makes the first experience with Construct3 for these people annoying. People will be more relaxed about the subscription model because now they aren't forced to pay to get rid of annoying artificial limits, now they pay to gain access to additional services. There are so many more good reasons for it like more potential addon creators, free users simply getting used to the tool and thus preferring it, increasing the chance of becoming customers, YouTubers like Gamefromscratch would actually cover Construct, etc. etc.

    It obviously needs a strategy how to turn free users into paying customers, but I think Construct is already well equipped for that. There are many features that actually make sense to put behind a paywall, you should only be able to exporting to the Scirra Arcade with the free version. Remote preview should be possible in the free version but only a very limited amount of times to show what you miss out on. Maybe Scirra offers its own cloud service, and free users can only save in the cloud with up to xMB available space, paid can save where they want and get a bit of cloud storage with their sub, as well as all the export options, the cloud build and minification service. So basically charging for services and convenience.

    So I'm not advocating for an (mostly) unrestricted free version because I don't want to pay, I advocate for it because I don't want Construct to lose against GDevelop, I don't want to be the next Clickteam Fusion in a couple years.

    But I obviously can only judge this from the outside, I genuinely think it would be the right move, but I recognize that I don't have access to any data about subscriber counts, if they go up or down, Scirra's financial situation, their burn rate etc. and speculating about the right strategy is easy when it's not your company on the line.

  • Can anyone think of a single other subscription based engine that doesn't have a fully featured free version?

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  • Take a look at Tilesetter led.itch.io/tilesetter

    With that tool you should be able to generate the 47 tile variants with the tiles you already have.

  • You know, that makes a lot of sense.

    Right?! Why would you still pay for C3 if you have to learn JS anyways? Very observant, with a simple and logical conclusion.

    I wonder if more people think that way?

  • Oh wow, now those are some banger addons :O

    It really shows that they are designed by someone with hands on experience, who knows how C3 ticks, and where its shortcomings are.

    Thanks for making these, and I hope you'll do more in the future.

  • Containers do not work with families, and you need families if you want to make things generic in C3.

    If you work with containers you need to add a new dictionary for every single object which you then can't universally address because you need to perform actions on that particular instance of the dictionary.

    Group #1 shows how it does work, here if you click Sprite_A, dict_A loses health, but not dict_B.

    Group #2 shows how it should work but doesn't. If I click Sprite_A here, dict_A AND dict_B lose health.

    Here is the project file: container_data_test.c3p

    But this is just an example I threw together, and it's not about solving just this very specific case. Having the ability to store bigger data in variables would make dealing with it as easy as dealing with strings or numbers. I often lose track of what I was working on because I get distracted by needing to solve mini puzzles on how to deal with data.

    Maybe not everyone likes my solution to the problem, however basically everyone expressed that they do find dealing with data difficult. That was my motivation behind this suggestion, and starting a discussion.

  • I'm not suggesting this should replace JSON/Dictionary/Array, so you will still be able to use it.

    In other engines you can store all kinds of stuff in variables, it is not some crazy outlandish idea. Construct is actually very odd in that regard that you can't even store arrays in variables.

    Also at this point I'm expected to know more different coding paradigms in this "No coding required" engine with "Game Changing Visual Scripting" than I need for an actual coding required engines.

    UI = Html + CSS

    Data = XML or JSON

    And more and more often = Javascript

  • i think there is a plugin called herostats that does all this

    I don't know of such a plugin, can you provide a link please —

  • ...dealing with JSON is not as easy in C3 as working with variables

    So you mean it doesn't bother you?

    Because I don't see how the JSON workflow is any better than the workflow with Dictionaries for example. Basically all the points I made under "Things to avoid" also apply to JSON, or not? And only half of what I mention under "Requirements" is actually possible with JSON.

  • R0J0hound made a good suggestion

    ...to be really useful it should be possible to change all the values at once easily. ...Like in many programming languages you can set a vector struct with something like velocity=vec(100,100).

    So here is a mockup of how that would look.

    Here you can see that it gives hints for the expected data, just like functions.

    And this is how it would look with the complete data filled in. Again including the nested custom data. First one is with the custom data written in directly, second one is with custom data already stored in another variable.

    Here are a few ideas how a global variable containing custom data could look like on the event sheet.

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TackerTacker

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