Construct becomes sluggish, then freezes after 10-15min

Just want to add that I have been struggling with this issue for more than a year. Clearly it's some issue with the integration of Construct 2 with Steam. It's not surprising that neither Valve nor Scirra would want to take on the burden of investigating and fixing it, and I totally believe that Valve is mostly unresponsive to developers now that they have so many products on the service. Still, it's unfortunate that no one will help the many customers who have legitimately purchased the software and want to put it to use.

I don't know that I can add anything to the technical conversation, but I will say that it seems to me that it's really the display of the application that becomes sluggish, not the actual operation of it. By which I mean that if I click on anything or scroll my mousewheel it will actually be registered by Construct, but the display doesn't update until after a long delay or if you minimize then maximize the window. Even then, I usually have to bring another fullscreen window up over Construct and dismiss the new window again to get the Construct window to draw normally again. It's gotten so that I can do this process in my sleep, but it's frustrating how often I have to. Turning off autosave seemed to help for me at one point, but it seems less effective than it was at first; maybe there's something else I'm doing that triggers it.

On behalf of Steam Construct 2 users everywhere: I know that Construct 2 is getting further and further in the rear view mirror, and that the Steam application has always been the red-headed stepchild version, but you have a crippling workflow issue being experienced by legitimate customers who paid you a significant amount of money. I think it deserves putting some real effort into it. I'm sure it will take action from both Scirra and Valve to sort it out since clearly the source of the problem isn't obvious, and I know that might be a nigh impossible channel to open and coordinate. But as it is, both companies are letting their customers down.

On behalf of Steam Construct 2 users everywhere: I know that Construct 2 is getting further and further in the rear view mirror, and that the Steam application has always been the red-headed stepchild version, but you have a crippling workflow issue being experienced by legitimate customers who paid you a significant amount of money. I think it deserves putting some real effort into it. I'm sure it will take action from both Scirra and Valve to sort it out since clearly the source of the problem isn't obvious, and I know that might be a nigh impossible channel to open and coordinate. But as it is, both companies are letting their customers down.

I won't rely on Valve at all, they turned into a big cooperate money making machine not giving a frick about their customers or publishers.

(I'm not overreacting, I'm just telling you the facts.)

This problem with Valve's support will always exist and I think they will never change/improve that.

On Scirra's (focus on Ashley 's) side of things it is a bit "difficult", Ashley himself stated that

he will try to keep up with the maintenance of C2 and maybe add new features under certain circumstances.

So I cannot really blame him if he is not actively working on specific bugfixes, however I think an issue like this

which already exists for more than 2 years cannot just slip through and be ignored.

Even if Ashley's hands are tied and he so far didn't succeed in reproducing this bug, there are always other ways

to gather more helpful information that might lead to the final bugfix to this issue.

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I know that some people might not agree with the following which is totally fine but I would like to request

a well detailed post with the following information from users who still experience this issue:

• Full list of hardware (specs including driver details)
• Details about the preferences (autosave turned off, caching off?)
• List of programs that could cause this issue (virus protection programs, steam ...)

I hope that we can maybe isolate common used programs or drivers and finally fix this bug.

Here is my part to my previous request (using dxdiag):

Hardware:

• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
• Processor: AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor, 4 CPUs ~3.6GHz (Overclocked to 4.2GHz)
• Memory: 8192MB RAM
• DirectX Version: DirectX 11
• Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
• Dedicated Memory: 4026 MB
• Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz) [2 Monitors in total]
• Driver Version: 10.18.13.6143
• Default input: Wireless Keyboard + Mouse

C2 Preferences:

• C2 (r221) running as Admin
• Autosave: OFF
• Backup: ON
• Cache Icons: ON
• Theme: Office 2010 Silver

Additional Information:

• C2: Steam Version (Personal), Steam Overlay OFF
• Virus protection: Avira Antivirus
• Always Active Online Connection

Hi guys!

I just made a new observation. Ever since I reinstalled Windows 10 Pro on my desktop computer (core i5 4670K, 16GB RAM, GTX960), as well as Construct 2 being auto-updated to version 212 (Edit: 221). I haven't had any issues with sluggishness. I even have auto-save activated nowadays. I would like to test this on my laptop as well, but unfortunately it is still away on repairs.

I will get back to you all. Anybody else feel improvement in version 212 (Edit: 221)?

Did you mean r221 or really the old version of C2?

Well for me everything is the same.

The sluggishness seems to occur with large projects only I think, at least on my end it does.

The audio playback and autosaving issues also only seem to occur with larger projects but those are different cases.

Anyway, — nice that you found a way to fix the issues on your end, but reinstalling windows doesn't seem to be a valid solution for me.

There is a bug somewhere that has to be found and fixed and I neither want to reinstall my whole operating system or wait for C3 to be released.

At last I would like to ask a question to Ashley about C2's theme system:

Do different themes have any impact on the performance of C2?

Did you mean r221 or really the old version of C2?

hahaha, sorry, I meant version 221. I unfortunately mixed up the digits and didn't double check it before I posted. I was hoping that the new version had something to do with the improvement and not the reinstallation of windows.

I will pick up my laptop from repairs today, If the problem still exist on that computer and they haven't formatted the drive it will be much easier to troubleshoot for me. I will post my findings here

At last I would like to ask a question to Ashley about C2's theme system:

Do different themes have any impact on the performance of C2?

I don't know - maybe, but it's not our code, it comes from the UI library.

— I know that this will probably lead to nothing but could you tell me your current C2 theme selected in the preferences?

— I know that this will probably lead to nothing but could you tell me your current C2 theme selected in the preferences?

It is the default theme. Everything in my current installation is set to default except "Preview Server" which is set to my local ip adress: 192.168.0.5 with port numer "50000". I got my laptop back from repairs yesterday, it is even worse than when I sent it away. With that being said, I guess we need to wait a couple of more weeks before I can troubleshoot the issue further. Currently I'm just so happy that Construct 2 works the way it is intended.

I wish I could say the latest version is better, but it's not. I'm running with autosave off and it greatly reduces both the frequency of the slow-down and the severity of it, but it still happens occasionally. I would guess that there's another feature that does something similar to the autosave that conflicts with the Steam.dll (or whatever is happening). I recently upgraded to Windows 10, and it behaves the same way I remember it behaving before the upgrade. Glad yours is better, g3nki!

Here are my system details in case they can help:

Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 10586) (10586.th2_release.160126-1819)

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690K CPU 3.50GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.5GHz

Memory: 16384MB RAM

DirectX Version: 12

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Chip type: GeForce GTX 970

Display Memory: 12171 MB

Driver Version: 10.18.13.6175

Construct 2 (r221) Personal Steam version

Autosave: Off

Backup: On

Cache Icons: On

Theme: Default

Virus protection: Windows Defender

So its been a while but I think I finally found a legit way to reproduce this bug.

I recommend taking 20-30 minutes of your time to try and reproduce this bug.

At first, you require the following:

• C2 Example for measurements and sluggishness tests
• My Program that automatically requests attention every 2 seconds.

(NW.js's "request attention" seems to be broken again, so I made this instead...)

• A dual screen setup with Windows 7/8/10 (preferably 1080p on both screens)

Initial steps to reproduce sluggishness:

1. Open the Capx file with the latest Steam release of C2 (preferably paid)

2. Maximize the C2 window on your main screen and set the project windows to something like THIS.

(It doesn't really matter, just make sure that there is a lot on screen.)

3. Open any unmaximized second window which requires a lot of resources on the 2nd screen.

(YT videos etc. or use the debug preview and create a lot of sprite instances using the 'space' key.)

4. Open my "Request Attention" program and also run it on the second window.

5. By now you should notice that C2 will be sluggish because of the heavy load on the 2nd screen,

keep on adding/removing events or change values and try to act like you would work on the project.

At some point you will also notice that it will take up to 1 second just to open the dialogs or change ACE values.

This is the moment were you can basically close all the programs on the second window and run C2 normally,

it will continue being sluggish even without heavy load in the background.

Final Thoughts (+problem speculations)

I took a day of from working on my project just to create this "working" test and I would really appreciate it

if Ashley or others from the community would take their time to run this test and try to reproduce this bug too.

I am still not 100% sure why C2 is affected by this but my guess is that the engine might get "confused" at some point because of the sluggishness and starts creating some sort of "trash data" which leads to even more sluggishness.

The following might be a little off-topic but I'm really desperate about this weird Windows issue for a while now.

I noticed that whenever a program on my second window requests attention (eg. the Steam chat), my programs on the main window start to suffer from sluggishness until I stop it from requesting. (C2 is the only program that continues to suffer even after stopping the request.)

I've Googled through A LOT of forums to find a fix for this issue, so far without any working results.

Ashley I know that you are a top-level expert when it comes to Windows & Web technology so if you got any ways to help me out on this,

feel free to PM me with anything that could help me to fix this issue once and for all.

Thanks for reading, looking forward to your results!

Does the new option to completely disable unique icons in r229 help? (it reverts all Sprite/Tiled Background etc to their plugin icons)

It might be GDI playing up again. It's a pretty crappy part of Windows.

Does the new option to completely disable unique icons in r229 help? (it reverts all Sprite/Tiled Background etc to their plugin icons)

It might be GDI playing up again. It's a pretty crappy part of Windows.

Great timing with the update, I will test it out.

I will do some testing with my stresstest and my main game, I'll share the results soon.

So far so good, no sluggishness at all.

It seems to work better now but I will still give it some time and share the results at the end of the month again.

Ashley thanks for this surprising update, I really didn't expect that.

TheRealDannyyy - Have you tried opening a big project with C2 r229? I get a lot of errors and very significant lag & slowness on projects with a lot of objects on r229 but fast on r228.