Je Fawk's Recent Forum Activity

  • Ashley thank you for the detailed reply.

    Our custom save system has been working well for SkyRanch.Life, and we do deal with hierarchies, but not much that's made dynamically and attached on the fly. As we continue development, there's always a chance that something will stop working and become a headache. I love headaches.

    Our system is pretty tedious and annoying, I'd gladly swap to the native one. I will give it a try before an update and report my findings (maybe within a month or so). I expect the cross version save will not work but we'll see.

    I would be thrilled to be proven wrong so badly that we can actually swap to C3's Save and Load system. I will personally send a sorry & thank you letter to Scirra's office by snail mail.

    Drawing Canvas not saving pixel info

    Interesting idea about the drawing canvas, but shouldn't be a problem for the more complex Steam games. Numerous games on Steam already have huge save games. I know Baldur's Gate 3 can be up to 400mb per file and it works well. I still think you should give the user this ability to decide for themselves, with proper documentation.

    We are actually using Drawing Canvas both in Nightwalkers.io and SkyRanch.Life. Nightwalkers isn't planed for Steam for the next 2 years. We use it to save effects of zombies being dead in the single player dungeon we got (since Nightwalkers is multiplayer).

    I could not allow the player to save the game when they're there I guess, or use C3's Save/Load as well as another system to save Drawing Canvas info, maybe. I've not tried. Sounds pretty complicated.

  • WackyToaster you're right, I don't want to talk about making my own save system here because I have one already, which is something I stated already. And yes the current Save/Load C3 has makes saves games unusable if you add more stuff to it.

  • Ashley I agree the built-in system should be used, and I did try to use it properly. I'd rather not pay for a game engine to not use it's features, I don't want my life to be harder.

    I made heavy use of the No Save behavior to keep things simple, but I kept running into issues. A lot of them were fixed, but I keep finding more, either bugs, edge cases, or weird quirks.

    For proper game dev, I need a save system I can fully trust, not one that works correctly "most of the time". I really do not need more headaches, and I'm sure you can understand that.

    I've been making games with C2 and C3 for around 12 years now, full-time. I've also talked to many other devs who ended up making their own save systems too. I don’t think we can all be wrong about this.

    About proving specific issues: I understand why clean bug reports are needed but it gets very time consuming. I report one issue, then after a few C3 updates I run into another one, then another, and so on.

    At this point, if i can find a workaround, I usually dont bother reporting the bug anymore. Narrowing it down can take a lot of time, and if I can’t isolate it fast enough I usually just move on.

    What i'm trying to learn now is what to avoid in C3 and what reliable workarounds other devs are using. That's why I made this post. And if there was info in the manual about it, I wouldn't be here wasting our time on this.

    Also, just to confirm: is the Drawing Canvas object not saved by the system?

    If it is not saved, I don't really understand why that is the default behavior. My expectation was that objects are saved unless you attach the No Save behavior, since that seems to be the purpose of that behavior in the first place??

    Another big issue is that the manual does not seem to mention this at all. Imagine making a game, using the built-in save system, and only later discovering that Drawing Canvas data is not saved. If I check the manual and it says nothing about that, it is very easy to make a bad assumption.

    I'm also not interested in handling this through network requests since that would be foolish of me. I've made enough multiplayer games to know saving such a thing is pointless.

  • I've been finding weird quirks and pieces of code that don't work with the Save and Load and I'm trying to compile a list in order to avoid these problems.

    A lot have been reported and fixed, while some are difficult to fix (e.g. github.com/Scirra/Construct-bugs/issues/9052 )

    I would expect the following to have some sort of problem but I've yet to test and/or discover any:

    • complex JS
    • heavy/slow loops especially with variables
    • complex hierarchies
    • complex timelines
    • complex flowcharts
    • some 3D stuff

    I'm not interested to hear "make your own system" since I've already done that, but when I participate in a game jam, I want to use C3's one.

    I'd like to know if anyone else has found info on what NOT to use since based on the manual, everything should work fine.

    Some of these are confirmed limitations, while others are user-reported edge cases that still need minimal reproduction projects before they can be treated as confirmed Construct bugs.

    Confirmed / expected limitations:

    1. Drawing Canvas pixel data — confirmed by Ashley: the Drawing Canvas instance is saved, but the pixel data inside it is not.
    2. Images loaded from URLs — mentioned by R0J0hound as not saved automatically.
    3. Sounds loaded from URLs — mentioned by R0J0hound as not saved automatically.
    4. Mid-flight network/file requests — confirmed/expected limitation mentioned by Ashley and R0J0hound.
    5. External JavaScript state — mentioned by R0J0hound / Nindool: JS state outside Construct's runtime needs to be saved manually.

    Reported by users as not working / causing problems:

    1. Wait for previous action to finish — reported by me as causing issues.
    2. Tweens during cutscenes — reported by andreyin: saving/loading mid-cutscene can break when waiting for tween movement to finish.
    3. NPC movement using Tweens — reported by andreyin: loading a save made around tween-based NPC movement sometimes caused an error and made the save unusable.
    4. Hierarchies in UI / battle menus — reported by andreyin: loading a mid-battle save broke menu hierarchies and attached/shadow objects.
    5. Dynamically created/destroyed objects with instance variables — reported by Nindool as inconsistent on load in some cases.
    6. Global variables changed inside functions called from timelines — reported by Nindool as sometimes loading off by a step or two.

    Suspected / hinted as potentially risky, but not directly confirmed:

    1. Some async operations mid-progress — suggested by R0J0hound as an area to be careful with.
    2. Saving during timelines / mid-execution timeline logic — hinted by Nindool's report, but needs a minimal repro.
    3. Worker-based async tasks, e.g. pathfinding — suggested by R0J0hound as something that may not save cleanly if mid-progress.

    Tagged:

  • Amazing find. I don't think I'd have managed, my patience for debugging and finding workarounds has been long depleted.

    Congratulations! And thank you for sharing (I'm not a tile-map user, never liked them, but I know plenty of people that use those).

  • Under Brave it worked, but using the installed app (Edge) it didn't, so there wasn't any network issue.

    Also I doubt my Edge browser had a problem since I never use it apart from C3, unlikely but possible.

    I randomly started the app now and it worked.

    No idea what's happening, I'll keep using the app for now.

  • Been working fine until today Ashley . I haven't used C3 in maybe a week and all of a sudden only gray screen with no error. I cleared the app's cookies but it seems I have to uninstall it or something.

    For the next LTS update on this version could we have some errors when this happens?

    I know it's impossible to debug without more info, but I have none apart from not starting it for a week.

    Edge did update when I started it now, and the pinned tab with the LTS release there worked fine, the app still not working.

  • Problem might have been caused by me unknowingly having 2 Construct 3 apps already installed (one from 2022, another one from 2024...).

    I uninstalled them. Now when I mouse over the install button (which initially was "Open in App") it shows Install Construct 3 LTS.

    Fingers crossed 🤞

  • I installed it from my pinned tab, and editor.construct.net/lts redirects to the address I used when installing it hmmm... I will give it one more go and report back.

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  • I dared installing C3 as a web app using Edge and I enjoyed it, more screen space + I can pin it + I can easily spot it in my taskbar etc.

    However it did auto-update to the newest stable version, when I was using the LTS one (I installed it from C3 running in a tab using LTS version).

    That was pretty bad. Why are we forced into updating to the latest stable version lol it's insane, it's the same mentality of Windows restarting to do an update because it just knows better than you.

    I literally cannot find a way to stop this using the app, am I missing something?

  • Worked fine all day until now, r 449-3

    Restarted C3 a few times, didn't help, so I assume it's not from my browser.

  • I agree about the bug report.

    It seems like 1 out of 20 chance when the game navigates to a random layout. Sometimes they happen one after the other when I start the preview (since I must close the tab when this happens), other times I can navigate 100+ and it won't happen.

    I'm still looking for others that experience the same in hopes that they have more info on this.

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Je Fawk

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Member since 7 Jul, 2014

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