How are things going?

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  • Hello everyone!

    I'm a long time C2 user but in the past year or so I had to take some time off from this Community and software due to my studies. So before I jump back in I just wanted to ask how are things going? How is the Community standing since the release of C3? Is everyone still as satisfied with Scirra as they were back a few years?

  • The developers are doing a stellar job and their engine is absolutely amazing.

    Unfortunately the community is a mixed bag,

    there are some cool helpful people on the forums,

    but most of the activity is bad people growing a community discord and most people go there because the bad people hoard any projects they can get their hands on and distribute it to the discord and people overlook the bad evil things for the free loot

    You may want to find them, get what you want/need and use them and then scram as fast as possible but make sure to think about your mental health and stress levels first and take care of yourself okay?

    Scirra started releasing a "tuesday tips" series and they are like super good tips you should totally check that out facebook.com/pg/ConstructTeam/posts I think you can subscribe soemwhere to get them straight in your email? do that they'Re awesome !

    The new runtime is super dope.

    Scirra has a github where you can report bugs now and they are working super duper hard they are doing an excelent job fixing those bugs !! make sure to report bugs when you see them it helps everyone! github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues

    There'S a new demo project called demonoire you should totes look at it ! it'S under game demos editor.construct.net

    Scirra has added support for the facebook instant games portal so check that out too !! construct.net/make-games/manuals/construct-3/plugin-reference/instant-games

  • About the same as it was 10 years ago, just less idea of wtf is next.

  • but most of the activity is bad people growing a community discord and most people go there because the bad people hoard any projects they can get their hands on and distribute it to the discord and people overlook the bad evil things for the free loot

    You may want to find them, get what you want/need and use them and then scram as fast as possible but make sure to think about your mental health and stress levels first and take care of yourself okay?

    Really no need to exaggerate this much, none of them are bad or evil people. Some can be quite a bit stuck-up but that´s the worst I´ve seen. Your mental health should not be affected by that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Or do I seem like such an evil person to you?

    I agree otherwise, scirra is doing good things. I can´t wait for them to "finish" the new runtime because then it means they can focus on new features and whatnot. Defenitely great times ahead!

  • Here is an invite link to the bad people discord

    https://discord.gg/dZDU7Re if you want to form your own opinion. Everyone is welcome to join.

  • Thanks for the answers.

  • It's kind of frustrating nowadays. If you plan to release an app to any of the markets with google ads, the app market now requires a GDPR dialog box that asks the user to opt into ads. We have literally been waiting for this for MONTHS with little to no feedback from Scirra. We've wasted 3 MONTHS of our subscriptions in a holding pattern waiting for this fix while other pointless features are added such as new templates etc. What's the point if you can't even make your app market compatible?

    An indicator of the health the product is the forums. Back in the heyday of C2, when you posted a forum post, the post would be relegated all the way down the page in hours - because of so many other posters actively using the product who had questions. Nowadays, your post can sit in the top 5 for days as postings become less and less.

    When my 50% subscription elapses, so am I. I'd rather spend the subscription $ on HBO.

  • I still use it for some educational sites / apps / activities but other than that I've actually moved over to Unity.Lots of Visual coding apps or kits that has me doing almost everythign I need. 2D or 3D.

    However, Construct is still great,esp for quickly fleshing out an idea. Hard to beat in that department. I just feel C2 is more useful than C3 at this stage because of more users and more plugins/behaviors. So lookign forward to the finished C3 runtime. I'm a little disappointment currently with C3 but I guess this is just because I/we? were so use to the speed of development and feedback etc that was always there with C2.

    It was exciting times then to log in every few days and discover a ton of new things either Scirra did or the community did, now - not so much. You often log in to basically see the same old discussions on the forum, many cool and valuable people left and as has been said, a lot of effort is spent on unnecessary things, yet stuff the community voted for as needed ages ago or keeps asking for just get ignored for various reasons. Other engines are starting to become good replacements for the "non coders" or for people lookign for visual coders/game makers etc.

    tl:dr

    It's still goo...no...great, software and excellent event system but let down by weird decisions and is slowly but surely getting caught by other engines/apps in my humble opinion.

  • I mean, the GDPR thing did nothing much except, for a lack of better words, fuck up everything and annoy everyone, developers and users alike.

    The fact that Scirra is awfully silent about the issue (though not entirely) is a different story. An issue like this should be pinned and updated/responed to imo.

    We've wasted 3 MONTHS of our subscriptions in a holding pattern waiting for this fix

    I understand what you are saying, but I hope you didn´t really just wait for 3 months. If you did... well maybe you should have used the time to polish the existing app, create a new one, prototype something, write a plugin that you could use, do some marketing,............ basically anything but waiting. It still sucks, but it would have not been a waste at least.

    other pointless features are added such as new templates

    I don´t know the inner workings of Scirra, but I doubt that the person responsible for the GDPR thingy is the same person who made new templates. And even if, maybe there was downtime like...

    It was really awfully timed aswell, since the new runtime was/is beeing worked on and they had to prioritize something, they can´t just drop everything. Not to mention you can´t have 5 people work on the same issue anyway. From what I´ve seen it was actually worked on pretty quick and put out for android, but apple did apple things so... I mean it could aswell be just a lazy excuse but then again, it´s apple. :V (Also I don´t feel like Scirra is beeing lazy)

    It was exciting times then to log in every few days and discover a ton of new things either Scirra did or the community did, now - not so much. You often log in to basically see the same old discussions on the forum, many cool and valuable people left and as has been said, a lot of effort is spent on unnecessary things, yet stuff the community voted for as needed ages ago or keeps asking for just get ignored for various reasons.

    Sadly true, especially rexrainbow and r0j0hound, but there´s always a chance they´ll come back, right? :I Also, it´s almost certain that new "valueable people" emerge, isn´t it? I think the forums sort of died off, particularely during that transition phase where everything was half-broken, but also generally because forums are old-school. Discord is the new "forum", sort of like whatsapp is the new "SMS"

    All in all I think Scirra is defenitely trying, but it´s hard to please everyone at the same time. And maybe they made some bad decisions or decisions not everyone agrees with (probably often not easy ones), but they certainly didn´t make them ill-willed.

  • Hello;

    The forums are dying not because of the GDPR dialog box but because they are losing the 12 year old game developers. They have a great easy to learn and use development environment but not many assets to make a game.

    The vase majority of game developers never finish a game, and almost none of them care about GDPR dialog boxes. They need to come up to speed quickly and have some nice spiders to shoot.

    The loss of rex-rainbow as a serious blow, I have to agree on that.

    yours

    Winkr7

  • I'm pretty certain Construct isn't used solely by 12 year old beginner devs.

    The GDPR/AdMob live banner iOS issue and how it's been handled has seriously screwed up my perception of Scirra/Construct - I've stopped recommending it now. The only reason I'm sticking with it is that several of my games are complete minus the iOS GDPR/AdMob fixes.

    From the beginning I've had several issues with plugin clashes that took ages to resolve (keep in mind that this platform is designed for those with little dev knowledge so we don't understand why things are broken so we spend forever looking for a fix/patch) and although Scirra did implement a social share plugin (as the one I found on GitHub was clashing with the Construct Google Play plugin) I'd have thought that things like a social share plugin was a basic for a mobile games dev engine - something like a social share plugin should have been there from the start.

    As such, my yearly subscription is almost up and in that time I've completed several short games but managed to launch exactly none of them as the iOS versions are incomplete. I *could* launch on Android only but I want to launch on both platforms to give them the best chance of success. Plus I chose Construct as it was marketed as for both Android and iOS - yes the games could go live on the iOS store but without the ability to monetise them or (earlier in my subscription) the ability to share socially whats the point?

    Right now it's *impossible* to monetise your app for iOS devices and there's next to no communication from the devs who are supposedly fixing it. There's plenty of Twitter updates on new templates and bug fixes and runtimes etc but absolute *silence* on the *major issue* of iOS/GDPR/AdMob - just feels like the *customer* base is being ignored.

    Scirra: "Hey, look at this cool thing we've done!"

    Customer: "Yeah, but what about that important issue we've been asking you to fix for months?"

    Scirra: "Look, a box of kittens!!"

    Just absolutely awful customer relations.

    The only thing Construct seems to have going for it right now is it's low price point - £79 per year *is* cheap for a games engine - but when you realise you can't actually monetise half the platforms you can develop for its a bit of a lame duck.

  • Can't you just stick a privacy policy and this gdpr/ads agreement under the play button and say: "by clicking on the play button you agree" to whatever your term and conditions are, you can also include a link to your full privacy policy. No need for any plugins ( you do not show ads until after they click on the play button and by that point thay have already agreed to your terms ).

    That would cover, iOS, Android, web, everything. That is how any web site does it, so what is the problem?

    If it's an issue with actual ads not working than that's a different problem.

  • The problem is the whole MobileAdvert plugin doesn’t work with the Google GDPR functionality - meaning even if we circumvented the GDPR functionality Live adverts just don’t appear on iOS only Test ads.

    We can only show AdMob averts with the MobileAdvert plugin and as that doesn’t work with iOS due to the Google GDPR we can’t show ads on iOS.

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  • C3 is coming along fantastically! It's in a great spot at the moment. Scirra have been great at fixing bugs and releasing regular updates. There's always a few features you wish it could have though (lots of old dark theme bug reports haven't been fixed 😅).

  • Scirra is doing great (check out blog posts for more info).

    I really like using C3, use it almost daily. ALso, I think it is affordable.

    The community is friendly and helpful in my opinion.

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