C2 gui enhancement ideas (@Ashley)

> I've not seen any web UI frameworks that in my estimation compare to what we use at the moment.

>

I'm not sure I understood what you mean. The web is miles ahead of the desktop in terms of styling and widgets. There's no desktop equivalent for CSS, and although there are many desktop UI widgets, they're hard to integrate if they come from different sources, and none of them are as extensible as their javascript-based counterparts.

Where I work we make extremely high end enterprise applications and the front end UIs that the customers see are super advanced HTML/JavaScript/CSS/AJAX/JQuery/etc. However in no way is the state of UI frameworks and extensibility anyway near as advanced as in the desktop world. The reasons are obvious, the desktop (Microsoft .Net) is a continuation of decades of advances.

The equivalent of CSS in the desktop world is called XAML styles... same thing except more powerful... not that C2 has any need for cascading styles within the developer environment itself.

It is possible for some of the C++ parts of the current C2 to be turned into a "user control" and hosted inside the new UI (and call code with pInvoke) so that it can get up and running much faster by transitioning instead of starting over all at once.

You are not going to get a DataVIewGrid, PropertyGrid, Dockable toolbars and windows, XML + LINQ, WebBrowser control, advanced treeviews, DataSets, on and on all in one HTML framework... You would have to build a lot of things from scratch and patchwork a bunch of libraries together to get something only "close".

Only Scirra can answer what their actual percentage of market share is between Windows and all other OSes, but if it is like the rest of the world then the market share for Apple / Linux just wouldn't justify building everything from scratch with a technology base that has zero backwards compatibility with their existing code base.

If, as Ashley states, it could potentially take up to a year to recode the IDE with virtually no updates to C2, this looks like commercial suicide to me.

• Most current feature requests, besides modularity, are for editor improvements (In fact, you can even make a solid argument that modularity is actually and IDE feature instead of a runtime one).
• A multiplatform localized editor has potential to bring in a lot of money.
• The new asset store would bring in a ton of revenue if people could mod the IDE. Remember scirra takes a 30% cut.
• Scirra is very lean, and a construct 3 MVP would only take a few months to reach market. The thing that would take more than 1 year would be feature parity with c2, but we can tolerate that since we'd be paying for early access. We've done it once before with the move from CC to C2, we can do it again. It's not like scirra is ripping us off, anyone who knows even a tiny bit of c2 can make the money back easily.
• I don't mean to be rude, so please don't take this the wrong way, but IMHO ultimately it's not our place as a community to evaluate the business viability of an idea, just to express demand (or lack thereof) for it. Let Scirra be the judge of what risks they should and shouldn't take. I'd hate for people to vote against an idea just because it might not be viable technically/commercially.

Development on C2/the runtime would not stop completely - it would just slow down. There's a steady stream of new browser features, compatibility changes, platform tweaks, bug fixes etc. that regularly need addressing, and we would keep doing that. There may be minor new features as well, but it would be more like a maintenance mode than a steady stream of new features.

I don't think the sales impact would be anywhere near that bad. People don't hold off buying Office 2010 because they knew Office 2013 would inevitably show up a bit later, right? If you need to do something now then you'll have to look at the options that are there now, and it's still a great product with loads of features. I am confident despite the scope of the idea it would not come close to "killing" Scirra.

I regularly shoot down the idea of 3D and I'll keep doing it - I think it would be a totally different product, and as one of my linked posts said, it seems to me kind of paradoxical to have all the complexity of 3D and still try to make it simple. Modularity is a very compelling feature, but is a huge undertaking and would probably be easier to code in from the ground up while reworking the editor.

Anyway, don't get too distracted by particular technology choices or business plans - the key question is basically when to do a new editor. Also as Fimbul mentioned it's hard for outsiders to take in to account everything that we do internally, but the feedback from real users is always useful. I guess it comes down to: do you want a dream UI with everything, but after a long time, or for slow and perhaps painstaking updates to the existing editor, but arriving sooner?

Commercial viability is always a fine balance between the needs of the business and those of its customers. Only Scirra truly know what they are, but in my view some sort of expansion of the comapny is due. Failure to keep up with the competition wont help anyone.

I dont know whether new employees are on the cards but there is work to be done and not many hands to do it.

Development on C2/the runtime would not stop completely - it would just slow down. There's a steady stream of new browser features, compatibility changes, platform tweaks, bug fixes etc. that regularly need addressing, and we would keep doing that. There may be minor new features as well, but it would be more like a maintenance mode than a steady stream of new features.

One of my favorite apps in the world is PropellerHead's Reason. It was already very good before they added an extensibility API, but after they added that everything went into Turbo mode... third party developers have made dozens of super powerful add-ons that PropellerHead simply would not have had time to build themselves... in the mean time they instead spent their time making major core additions to the product instead of making all those instruments etc.. that the third parties made.

Adding modularity / extensibility would be a game changer.

Though not having a clear and certain export path to all platforms is also a big sore point... Maybe PhoneGap will take care of that for all new devices going forwards at least. The only thing I would be more interested in and willing to pay a couple hundred dollars for is an export to Unity like I have seen for Spriter so I could know for sure my game will work right on all the mobile platforms as well as larger devices... when I finally get my game done I do not want to fight with Cocoon, Ejecta, etc... to try to get it production ready.

Ashley I have been using C2 productively for 1.5 years. We have found C2 to have plenty of features and incredibly well designed. However, the main blockage to productivity has been the IDE

• search functions - highlight your search query in the text and being able to search across multiple even sheets
• copy/pasting
• it would be great if the objects (in the right panel) could be sorted or filtered on type. e.g., show me all my TileBackgrounds
• debugging is still quite difficult and takes up a significant amount of time in larger projects

Some of these features I try to use work arounds but when you have multiple people working on a project who don't share a single work system it quickly gets a bit hairy.

So my vote would be to slow down on the new features and instead make some qualitative improvements in the actual work environment

I use Construct for a long time, since Construct Classic actually, and I would love some improvements on the IDE. The engine is awesome as it is, of course new features are always useful and fun, but if Scirra decides to make a new IDE that is more friendly dor the developers, I will be 100% supportive of that.

Development on C2/the runtime would not stop completely - it would just slow down. There's a steady stream of new browser features, compatibility changes, platform tweaks, bug fixes etc. that regularly need addressing, and we would keep doing that. There may be minor new features as well, but it would be more like a maintenance mode than a steady stream of new features.

Instead of making a C3 (yet still be able to get compensated $$$ for the time spent) you could make a "Pro/Advanced" editor... you can then make core changes to both version, but the "Pro/Advanced" has modularity / extensibility so that the community can make their own changes.

I would love to have mouse wheel scrolling support in the add event/action window.

win 7 64

Ashley,

Could the undo / redo in the editor provide the number of the event that was modified ..

I.E : undid add action event 11

Also could you add expressions for avail width/height to nw plugin for resizing window and accounting for taskbar size.

I don't think modularity is as demanded as people make it seem. Rename anything with conflicting names and copy and paste it into the new project.

Edit : Here's an idea

When you paste objects from one project into another project, maybe you could provide a dialog

1. Normal (If you paste an object that exists already, it will be created instead. No behaviors will be copied)

2. No conflict (Pasted objects will be auto renamed if they already exist)

3. Replace (Replace any existing objects with the pasted version. Behaviors and animations will be replaced)

4. Extend (Extend any existing objects from the pasted version. Non existing behaviors/animation will extend the object)

I'd rather some work be done to the editor for collaboration. Don't come up and tell me to use git or similar, it's counter intuitive and has u working in turns. Would it be possible to do peer to peer editing somehow? Where both ppl are syncing a similar capx and changes made on one client are applied to the other

justifun

Works fine in mine ?

[quote:3py6zibk]As for construct 2, I've been extremely satisfied with it, and I think I got more than my money's worth out of it. I'm not sure anyone in the community can disagree, especially considering the free (and frequent) updates we've been getting all this time.

I'm in favor of a Construct 3. Why don't you post a poll discussing it?

Agree 100 %. The update output has been incredible and for me Construct 2 isn't lacking anything feature-wise right now. It can more or less do anything I want it to. But the IDE has a lot of impractical little quirks that get in the way sometimes.

So yeah, all for Construct 3 with a fresh IDE. I don't mind the wait and will happily pay for a new license (provided C2 projects can migrate over to it).

So yeah, all for Construct 3 with a fresh IDE. I don't mind the wait and will happily pay for a new license (provided C2 projects can migrate over to it).

Considering the project files are currently XMLs, if construct 3 maintains an open architecture with XML or JSON, I might be able to make a converter myself.

I think the ability to associate an event sheet to an object could be cool. So when you create an event sheet to handle a specific object only, you can select it from the object properties and open it directly from there, instead of skimming through lots of event sheets.

Being able to select objects from the Z order list would make things a lot easier, though it's not a massive deal.