Download Construct 2 release 38.2

Download Construct 2 public preview 38.2

Link to release 37

(r38 accidentally broke XP support - it's fixed in this release. The rest of this post is a copy-paste from r38.)

Tiled background is new to this build! First, though, a little bit of eye candy: it's a minor cosmetic change, but objects in the editor now have full edge smoothing. It looks like antialiasing, but technically isn't quite the same (it's sort of blending the edges with the background). Just a nice-to-have.

<img src="http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases/r38a.png">

You can also set the browser you want to launch for preview in project properties. Right now, I'd recommend Internet Explorer 9 even if it's not your day-to-day browser - it definitely has the fastest and best quality canvas at the moment. You can get it via Windows Update on Vista or 7. On XP, Firefox 4 seems to be next best. Chrome is an excellent browser overall but its canvas is a little behind the others - it's a bit slow and pixellated. I'm sure they'll catch up eventually though.

So: tiled background. This has two big improvements over the Classic tiled background:

• You can rotate it!
• There is no power-of-two requirement!

For the second point (power-of-two) - Classic couldn't tile non-power-of-two textures (NPOT) properly. Modern graphics cards have supported NPOT textures for a while now. C2's OpenGL renderer has been designed to take full advantage of this. This means textures of any size tile seamlessly at any zoom or angle. All browsers except Safari can do the same too (I'm sure Safari will fix theirs soon). Even Sprites are using NPOT textures behind the scenes. In short, in C2, you can forget about power-of-two textures completely. There's no change in functionality or VRAM saving whatsoever!

One more thing: whenever we get round to an OpenGL (desktop) exporter for C2, both the edge-smoothing and NPOT tiled background will carry over to that as well, since it'll use the same renderer.

Changelog

• [Add] Tiled background plugin. Rotatable, seamless and no power-of-two requirement.
• [Add] 'Preview browser' setting to project properties. Can choose which browser launches out of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, providing they're installed, or leave at system default browser. The setting persists, which is great if like me you want to browse the web in Chrome, but use IE9's canvas for preview, which is better right now.
• [Change] Insert Object dialog now groups plugins in to their categories.
• [Change] Layout view: Sprites previously had half-smoothed edges in the editor (sort of like antialiasing but cut off half way). They now have full-smoothed edges for better quality.
• [Change] Rearranged layer properties in to two groups - editor properties (only affect its use in the editor) and layer properties (affect the layer at runtime).

(- [Fix] r38 broke XP support)

Fixed!! Thanks now I can enjoy r38

Do you plan to allow to change key for the platformer plugin ? Or add actions to trigger plateformer action (Trigger Jump, Trigger Up, etc...) so external object can control the platformer object.

Djordhan, of course - we're just working very quickly towards a basic but fully functional program first. We'll come back and add missing features soon.

Great work Ash!

I'll try to use it later tonight!

Sounds reasonable, though I wonder why you didn't do something else first, such as families. I know collision polygons will probably come alongside the image editor and animations for obvious reasons, but I wasn't expecting the Tiled Background plugin so soon, not that I'm complaining!

Anyways, sweet build!

The dev poll put more plugins as one of the next top requests - fine collisions was actually next up, but as you say that will come with the image editor, and I added rotated-box collisions as an intermediate step. I was also going to focus on more plugins next, especially data storage and maybe some browser specific stuff (like navigating to pages). Families is a very large and tough bit of work, especially the way it interoperates with the behaviors system - so that might be on the backburner for a bit. If you have any specific requests for plugins or minor features, let me know and I can take a look.

Animations & image editor - no ETA I'm afraid - "when it's done". I'll go poke Davo.

Great this new tiled bg is beyond awesome !

Keep getting this though, couldn't reproduce it, apparently not related to tiled bg :

Condition: system_expression != NULL

File: Projects\ExpTree.cpp

Line: 657

Function: void __cdecl ExpIdentifier::Evaluate(class ExpResult &)

Build: release 38.2 (64-bit) checked

Component: Construct 2 IDE

(Last Win32 error: 0)

Started to popup when i tried to add a compare two values condition, entered values then pressed ok . Now it pops up every time i open the capx

Well, there were three main plugins that were specifically requested in the last dev poll:

** Array (though, I would personally go much further and introduce proper data structures and a visual array editor)

** Save

** Tilemap (seems to be a heavily requested plugin)

You were already planning on doing data storage anyway, so saving is covered, but I suggest doing a tilemap plugin next would be a good idea - it's been a heavily requested plugin since the 0.x days, and it can also be integrated with pre-existing tilemap editors such as Tiled, which can even make an early version of the plugin easy to use because the tools are already there for the user.

And I'm not sure if this is a 'minor' feature, but implementing resources (especially resources that you can place in the project folder/.capx file to allow for easy relative paths) would be a great idea, especially to make it easier for plugins such as sound later along the line.

Love the updates! I used to think I was going to switch from CC to C2 at the end of the year, but at this rate, late summer is looking pretty good. Keep it up!

One more thing: whenever we get round to an OpenGL (desktop) exporter for C2, both the edge-smoothing and NPOT tiled background will carry over to that as well, since it'll use the same renderer.

I really hope Microsoft one day supports WebGL. I just caught of glimpse of Windows 8 and I feel like I finally have a target OS. Come on IE10! Give us WebGL!

Could you add to 'Preview browser' setting option "browse", or something like that. I use Chrome portable and C2 can't find it. Would be good to have an option to browse and set the path to it.

IE9 is really fast! I prefer Chrome, but preview of the latest platform demo still stutters on Chrome and on IE9 is smooth. Hope they'll fix it in Chrome soon, though.

edit> I just noticed, there is a pixel gap under the player's sprite on IE9. On Chrome it's ok.

are you planning on adding per pixel physics collisions?