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 r400. Where has the time gone? It feels like it was only yesterday we were celebrating 300 Construct releases, but it was in fact about 2 years ago! It's a good time to look back and see what we've achieved.
100+ new features, 1000+ new additions
Another milestone to highlight is the number of new features and additions listed on our releases page. These have now crossed over 100 new features and over 1000 new additions since the first release of Construct! This is since its initial release back in 2017, so hasn't happened over just the last 100 releases, but it's another big milestone to reach and illustrates how we're always working hard to make Construct better than ever.
Lots of new Construct features
So, back to changes since r300. There have been far too many improvements and changes over the past 100 releases to make a complete list here, but here are a few of the highlights since r300.
- TypeScript support to complement our existing JavaScript support with the static-typed language - see the blog post Construct now supports TypeScript for more
- HTML layers for better integration of custom HTML content - see the blog post Better HTML integration with Construct's new HTML layers for more
- Support for recording MP4 videos in Chrome as well as AV1 video playback support - see the blog post Video and image improvements in Construct for more
- Support for exporting WebP images to reduce the download size, and later on support for AVIF too
- A new extension system for the Windows WebView2 exporter, as detailed in the blog post A new architecture for publishing web content to desktop
- We introduced a brand new WebGPU renderer for Construct using the latest graphics technologies - see the blog post Introducing Construct's new WebGPU renderer
- Custom actions which allow for extending objects with your own logic in an intuitive way
- Flowcharts which allow for designing tree-style data, such as conversation trees
- The ability to show icons in Text objects
- Tile randomization for Tiled Background to break up repetitive appearance
- Dynamic layers: add, move and remove layers at runtime
- Auto-keyframing in the Timeline Bar
- Progressive Web App (PWA) installation so web exports can be installed as apps the same way Construct itself can
- Support for publishing to Xbox using the UWP platform
As if that wasn't enough, we also launched Construct Animate out of beta!
New plugins and behaviors
Over the past 100 releases we also added some new plugins and behaviors:
Much more
This is still only a fraction of the work we did over the past 100 releases - beyond the headline features, there's also always a huge amount of work going on with smaller additions and changes, bug fixes, optimizations, new scripting APIs, under-the-hood upgrades, and making the most of updates to the web platform.
On web platform updates over the past 100 releases, again there has been a huge amount of work done by browser vendors, but a few highlights relevant to Construct include: broad support for WebP and AVIF images, increasing support for AV1 video, and MP4 video recording support in Chrome. And one more thing: at long, long last, there is finally universal browser support for the WebM Opus audio format. We've literally been waiting for broad support for an open audio codec since Construct 2's launch in 2011. The last hold-out was, of course, Safari, which added support years after all other browsers. But we finally got there in the end! In the long term this will help substantially simplify Construct's support for handling audio content.
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!