Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • I just tested this and it works fine for me. I would guess there is either it's less obvious than you think, or it's a device-specific graphics driver issue (both common issues). I would really recommend you file an issue for any such problems, as we have a process designed to help us properly investigate and resolve reports like this - it is usually impossible to help from just a forum post like this.

  • That's just a standard Windows security dialog for running an executable. It's probably only appearing because we made some changes to the executable since the last stable release, so it may be the first time your system has seen that particular executable. If you tell it to run anyway it should work as normal.

  • There isn't currently a way to do that from code, but we have an internal capability to do it which is easy to expose to code. So the next beta release will have an ImageInfo method toCanvas() which will let you extract the image off its spritesheet to a canvas (either HTMLCanvasElement in DOM mode or OffscreenCanvas in worker mode).

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  • The easiest approach is to block the Internet but allow domains of the form *.construct.net. There's more information (including a full list of domains Construct may use) in the education FAQ.

    Alternatively a more low-tech approach would be to get in early on a Monday morning, turn the Internet on, reload Construct on every device, then turn the Internet back off.

  • Thanks for confirming - we'll have a stable patch release out soon (r487.2) to fix this.

  • Does this still happen in the latest beta release r488?

  • 68kStudios - can you reproduce the issue by adding a 3D model to a new empty project? If so, please file an issue with that project.

  • I'm afraid there's little we can do with this report - if you can please file an issue as then that will provide the information we need to be able to help.

  • NW.js had a raft of other issues that regularly caused all sorts of problems and we had to work around, notably including relying on an undocumented feature to support the Steam overlay (via a Chromium command-line flag) which broke shortly after we moved off it and it took several months for a fix - so that would have been a significant problem had we stayed with it, but nobody noticed as we had already moved off. There are still a bunch of outstanding issues that were filed long ago such as #6485, #7658, #7659, #7685 and #8162. Things that broke in the past include gamepads (more than once), WebGL, file dialogs/file system access, a whole bunch of crashes that never happened in real browsers, performance issues, and regressions. Other issues with NW.js include:

    • Continued support for important features like Steam Overlay support relying on undocumented features that could break or be removed at any time without warning and with no workaround (at which point we'd probably be forced to move off to another technology anyway)
    • Infrequent/poor enough maintenance that I suspect it may be retired at some point soon
    • Bundling all of node.js significantly increasing architectural complexity for no benefit (as Construct no longer needs the node.js part at all), can cause weird bugs, and presenting a significant hurdle to conveniently integrating SDKs like Steamworks
    • Bundling the entire browser engine with the game (adding 100-200MB of file size)
    • Asset bundling relying on extracting a zip on startup, which is too slow to be usable for large projects - our own asset bundler is directly readable and so far more efficient on startup
    • No support for bundling in to a single EXE file, as the latest release supports (with a small file size too)

    In short from our point of view NW.js was kind of a nightmare to support, actually - it didn't "just work", it was a constant source of problems, had limitations we couldn't work around, and was risky as we had no way to guarantee long-term support for things like the Steam Overlay.

    Contrast that to the current desktop exporters - as of the latest release we have support for the Steam Overlay, a pretty comprehensive Steamworks plugin using our own simple and lightweight extension system, support for file system access including accessing known folders like 'Documents', support for windowing features, support for pointer lock and gamepads (via GameInput for Steam on Windows, for the time being), a high-performance custom asset bundling format, support for exporting a small convenient single EXE file, and more. In short I think we do cover everything NW.js used to, and then gone further with additional improvements. There's a few things that would be nice if it was smoother, but overall I'm happy we made the change, and I think by now Construct's desktop exporters are in a better place than we had with NW.js.

  • I'm afraid to me that looks a lot like a graphics driver issue. Inconsistent glitches that only occur on some devices are often caused by driver issues. Unfortunately the state of graphics drivers has always been poor, all through my carrer, and it's a constant problem for the industry, including being responsible for ruining the launch of major titles. It's not an issue specific to Construct, it's an issue with all computer graphics really.

    One workaround may be to switch the project back to WebGL if WebGPU is enabled, which you can do in Project Properties. Perhaps the older renderer technology is more consistent, especially on older devices.

    In some cases it's possible for us to work around driver issues in Construct itself, but we need detailed information from affected users to be able to do that. If you can get a few users who see the glitches to get this information and share it, we may be able to work around it:

    1. Open Construct 3 at https://editor.construct.net
    2. Choose Menu > About
    3. Click Copy platform information for issue report
    4. Paste the copied text and share it

    For example in the past, with sufficient evidence from affected users, we've determined that WebGPU has rendering glitches due to graphics driver issues on Intel Gen7 GPUs, and worked around it by disabling WebGPU on those systems. It's possible we could do something here, but only if we have the necessary evidence.

  • Well, Construct is a game engine, and so it's designed accordingly - normally everything fully suspends in the background because it's the most user-friendly thing to do and is sometimes a requirement for store publishing or some kinds of application certification. Construct provides the suspend and resume triggers so you know when it is changing state, but that's about it. If you truly need some process to run in the background, you could look at finding a third-party addon for running in the background, developing a custom wrapper extension for a desktop app, or just use a different tool such as a node.js service which is better suited to running like a server.

  • There's a relatively small set of changes in that release which potentially narrows it down a lot, but I'm afraid from your description alone it's not clear what change could be responsible. Perhaps there is an accidental side-effect from an unrelated change. I think we will need a smaller project demonstrating the issue to be able to resolve it. The bug report guidelines includes advice on stripping down a full project to a smaller reproduction project for a bug report.

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Ashley

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