We release an update to Construct about once a week. This helps make sure Construct is improving quickly and changing in response to your feedback. And we've kept this up for another 100 releases! Our latest beta release is r300. It's a milestone we never reached with Construct 2, which shows how much further Construct 3 has come.
It's a good time to look back and see what we've achieved in the approximately two years since we celebrated 200 releases.
Lots of new Construct features
There have been far too many improvements and changes over the past 100 releases to make a complete list here. It includes close to 1000 bug fixes! You can find a history of all releases with a full list of changes on our releases page, but here are a few of the highlights since r300.
- We added a range of new 3D features, including 3D Shape, 3D Camera, depth-based effects like Fog, and more. See our blog Explore new 3D features with Construct's 3D Camera for more on that.
- The new Templates feature allows for easily repeating changes across your project, as well as making presets to dynamically create at runtime.
- The new HTML Element plugin makes it possible to use custom HTML and CSS content in your projects - one of the many advantages of Construct being a web-based engine. See our blog Designing UIs with HTML and CSS to learn more about that.
- We've added more guided tours to help give beginners a step-by-step introduction to things like timeline animation, JavaScript and game design. Try a guided tour now, or find more in the Guided tours section of the main menu.
- Thanks to our friends at Viridino Studios we added over 100 impressive new example projects to help you get started and demonstrate the capabilities of Construct!
- In fact we ended up with so many examples, we introduced the new Example Browser to help search through them, and redesigned the Start Page too. Find out more in our blog Explore hundreds of examples in Construct's new Example Browser.
- The new scene graph feature allows building hierarchies of connected objects. See our blog Let's talk about the Scene Graph! to learn more.
- We added sub-layers for better organisation and new compositing effects. See More efficient and more advanced effects with sub-layers.
- Mesh distortion also added a way to get impressive new visual effects in your projects, including a built-in mesh editor. Find out more in our blog Have you heard about Meshes?
- Another popular change was adding a layer interactive setting, making it easy to set layers to ignore input.
In our latest betas we've made even more improvements, including improvements to the debugger, effects, timelines, 3D rendering, 8 Direction solid sliding, and more!
Construct Animate public beta
In an exciting experiment we launched a public beta of our new animation software Construct Animate! Since the announcement back in May we've make a ton of improvements to the Timeline Bar and added a whole new Image sequence exporter, so if you haven't tried it for a while, give it another spin at animate.construct.net/beta. We have more on the way too, including support for exporting MP4 videos, support for the modern AV1 video codec, and even support for exporting GIFs! Meanwhile we are certainly not giving up on games, and you can still expect many more games related updates, as the latest Construct 3 betas are demonstrating.
Construct technology upgrades
Some changes are not always as visible, but still matter. Over the past 100 releases we've also done a lot of work to improve the technology inside Construct, including:
- Completely rewriting our entire effects engine, improving performance, fixing long-standing issues and making new features possible
- Adding two new lightweight desktop exporters, Windows WebView2 and macOS WKWebView
- Support for image rotation on spritesheets to save memory
- Revising the scripting feature to support modern JavaScript Modules that integrate well with Construct
- Significant upgrades for our codebase, including moving to JavaScript Modules internally, using a new JavaScript minifier, upgrading the way preview works to better support new HTML and CSS features, migrating the entire editor to use modern Pointer Events instead of a mix of mouse/touch events, simplifying how Layout View rendering is handled, and more
- Lots of updates to make best use of the latest browser technology, updates for third-party services like Cordova, and internal library upgrades
These kinds of thing aren't always something that makes a big change to you as a user of Construct, but is important in the long term to make sure we have a modern and healthy codebase that we can keep extending in the long term without running in to limitations. It also helps make sure we can keep fixing bugs and improving performance.
Web platform improvements
Construct is based on web technology, and since we first went with HTML5 in 2011, it's constantly been getting better as thousands of engineers at companies around the world work non-stop to improve browsers. And today it's better than ever! Over the past 100 releases we've been able to take advantage of the latest improvements in web technology, including:
- Enjoying outstanding game performance as browsers are faster than ever - even being far faster than some native tools
- In fact both Construct and the games it makes can now run on devices as small and low-cost as the Raspberry Pi 400!
- Adding support for local file & folder saves thanks to new support for the File System Access API in browsers
- Support for WebGL 2 everywhere, since Safari 15 finally added support
- Support for the modern high-performance WebP image format has become near-universal since the addition of support in Safari as well, and we will be updating Construct in future to take advantage of this.
- We've also written an entire experimental WebGPU renderer for Construct, based on the latest up-and-coming browser graphics technology. We're still working on this and we will start the process of rolling out support for it once the first browser ships support for it enabled by default. See our past blogs on A brief history of graphics on the web and WebGPU and From WebGL to WebGPU in Construct to learn more.
- In our latest betas Construct supports being associated with the .c3p file extension (thanks to the new File Handling API) and using all available local fonts (thanks to the new Local Font Access API), both of which should come to the next stable release in a few weeks.
Onwards!
It’s been another incredible couple of years for Construct - the team have been working really hard and we're proud of what we've achieved! We're going to keep it up, too. The technology of both Construct and the web platform it's built on keep improving and getting better than ever, with more features, better performance, and increased reliability. We really hope you all continue to enjoy using Construct, and we hope you're looking forward to the next 100 releases too!