Construct 3 r50

Notes

For our 50th Construct 3 release it's a big one! Here's a summary of everything that's in this build. Note you can now also 'favourite' changelog items on the left to show you like them!

New 'Light' theme: the counterpart to the Dark theme, we now have a new theme for people who prefer a light style UI.

GPU profiling: this build introduces a new GPUUtilisation expression, which is the GPU equivalent of the existing CPUUtilisation expression. This provides a useful approximiation of how busy the GPU is as a percentage, i.e. how much rendering work is being done. This is an important new performance measurement since previously there was no direct way to determine how busy the GPU was. Since it's important, we've also added it to the debugger, Remote Preview's stats, and the Tech Demo examples. Note that not all devices can report this information; it requires WebGL, but not all devices that support WebGL can report GPU usage. Also note that this is based on hardware measurements on the GPU: if you have poor performance it's not because of Construct 2, HTML5, browsers or JavaScript; it means your game is too intensive on rendering, and the result would be the same in any other framework with the same rendering approach.

In addition to that we've done several optimisations in this build. Iain has done lots of great work on the Opus decoder (used when the browser doesn't have built-in support for Opus), and it's now much faster and more reliable, and can use WebAssembly for even faster decoding where supported. Large projects should be faster to open now, and general rendering performance in the Layout View should be improved. Finally we've come up with an entirely new rendering approach for Tilemaps, which is far faster. Previously tilemaps would have to keep switching textures as it rendered times, but now it can render an entire tilemap with no texture switches at all. This currently only affects the editor, but we will port the new approach over to the Construct 3 runtime, when we come to that.

Finally as ever there's a batch of bug fixes and some changes. We're also currently working on the Construct 3 manual and hope to have it ready soon!