Construct 2 - Realistic State after 1 gazilion downloads

Tom

on Construct 2 homepage * is only next to iOS [ * via CocoonJS ]

Why not next to Android?

Crosswalk is still beta

— they released fusion 2.5.but its expensive for my economical status...

szymek +1

Not to sound rude or anything, but I do think some people here would do better if they focused less on how to make money from their games, and more on how to make their games better. If you've bought C2 expecting to get rich quick by flooding the app stores with clones, you're gonna have a bad time.

lolpaca

how you come to this conclusion?that some people bought c2 to get rich by flooding the app stores with clones?what is the definition of clone?if you mean games like flappy bird you are right its a bad idea.i build for example a horizontal space shooter like rtype and for months i make blender 3d my best friend.too much work and a lot of learning process via tutorials.But if someone clones something and make it decent why not?there are good clones and bad copies. Oddplanet is veeeery inspired by limbo we can say that is a clone of it, LAD game also is a clone.its not a bad thing.If they are decent why not?

spy84 I wasn't talking about anyone or any game in particular, sorry if it came across like that! There just seems to be a lot of talk about monetising, advertising etc on the boards, but sometimes when I click through to play the game in question it's either in need of a *lot* of polishing, or it's a very simple clone game that already exists 1000 times over. It sometimes feels like people are putting the cart before the horse a little bit.

Anyway, I've just realised this isn't really relevant to the main topic which was about exporting, so I'll shut up

This has been an entertaining thread.

But on a serious note, when I bought into C2 it was with the knowledge that things will be updated at a regular pace, and that has been exactly what happened. I trust the priorities that Ashley sets out for the future of C2, and I will continue to do so as he hasn't put a foot wrong so far.

Patience and understanding is something to consider, C2 is a gift that makes making games easy, and it will continue to be updated.

spy84 I wasn't talking about anyone or any game in particular, sorry if it came across like that! There just seems to be a lot of talk about monetising, advertising etc on the boards, but sometimes when I click through to play the game in question it's either in need of a *lot* of polishing, or it's a very simple clone game that already exists 1000 times over. It sometimes feels like people are putting the cart before the horse a little bit.

Anyway, I've just realised this isn't really relevant to the main topic which was about exporting, so I'll shut up

no you are right but this is not only for games its for everything that costs money.from clothes to cars from food to services the most of them are overpriced.

Maybe the talk about ads and monetising lasts so much because we have not cleared yet that is fully funcional in c2 and works like charm. And we have to face the truth that because of the economical situation the unemployment, and that things always get harder and not better, people (me too) have the hope that "maybe" can sell a game and get some money doing something that we like the best. If we failed making a bad game(s) maybe we reconsider what were doing wrong.And start to work and think different.if not maybe we quit what were doing and do something else.if we succeed we will continue to evolving our selfs and set the target higher.

Crosswalk has only been around a couple of months, and in that time it's already improved a lot and fixed a bunch of bugs. In the near future I am absolutely confident it will be bulletproof and we're working closely with Intel to support the last features everyone wants (ads, IAP etc). The fact there are bugs in the beta is to be expected and they will be resolved as Intel are actively working on it. Several issues have already been fixed which you can test already with the beta/canary build option. Given how new Crosswalk is and how steady its progress has been I do not understand why anyone would be ready to write it off already. Of course all new engines go through a beta period with a few issues before reaching maturity, that is normal. It will get there soon and the existing progress and even the current state of the canary build option is good evidence of that.

I also want to point out that we are designing the engine to scale well to large, ambitious scale games. I believe games like Airscape and Penelope prove this is already possible. Optimisations like the recent collision cells go a long way toward making this a reality (collision cells themselves being a relatively new feature). Perhaps a reason there aren't so many "big" games in Construct 2 is people think since there aren't many big games, the tool must only for small games, and then not so many developers attempt big games. I don't think this makes much sense when big games are already being developed and published with Construct 2, but the stereotype persists and probably to some extent is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We also know lots of people develop small and medium sized projects commercially for various clients including for mobile browsers, where it serves as a profitable and efficient tool. Perhaps that's just an easier way to make money than with a single huge make-or-break game; either way, we don't mind, we just make the tool. But we are still thinking about how the engine could better handle large games in case that's what people are after, and any optimisations aimed at large games will probably help smaller games too.

We also have more optimisations in the works for future builds and we know every browser maker is as conscious of performance as ever and are working on optimisations on their side as well. For example we're aware that one of Google's priorities with Chrome this year is to maximise GPU performance on mobile, and they have some very interesting optimisations in the works towards that (e.g. the ubercompositor, zero-copy rasteriser, etc). All of this will also reach Crosswalk.

As for iOS, CocoonJS does work for a lot of people for publishing iOS games. We are still trying to work with them to get support for things like memory management. If there are other issues, as ever sending them a clear and detailed bug report with a minimal project to reproduce the problem can mean the difference between getting it fixed and not getting it fixed. However as a lot of you have also mentioned, we're not entirely satisfied with Ludei's rate of progress, so to provide an alternative we will look in to an official Ejecta export option in the near future (we are currently tied up with multiplayer, but hopefully some time in the next stable cycle). However AFAIK it does not have memory management, no Web Audio API support, no WebRTC, no Web Workers (for faster pathfinding), no XML parsing, and no vibrate support. Some of these may be fixable but it remains to be seen if this will be any better than CocoonJS. Still, having a second option could be useful for some games.

I'd also point out that nobody in this thread so far appears to have tried to argue that native exporters would still be worth it given the likely disadvantages from my previous post. Having a portable engine that can guarantee that even just the logic will work 100% identically is a pretty big advantage and removes a whole layer of porting problems. Remember we are trying to pursue solutions that are both fast and compatible to make porting worry-free. Crosswalk is a perfect example of a perfect solution to that end. We are trying to resist spending months of painstaking work to trade performance problems for some very awkward compatibility problems.

Ashley

I think people here are not referring to the lack of big games on PC, certainly there are already quite a few, Ubi, Airscape, Our Darker Purpose, and Penelope along with quite a few huge games currently in development.

They are referring to the lack of big games on mobiles, and it is true. We have been severely limited by CocoonJS's lack of memory management for so long, anyone who embarked on a big game for mobiles is either a) naive or b) extremely brave. I fell into the category A. :p

But luckily Crosswalk saved my bacon, and now I just eagerly await the Ad/IAP support and it's all good, no more excuses for my failures. But indeed, iOS remains a huge hurdle with our current options. CocoonJS is fine for smaller games, as we all agreed, but there seem to be no indication from Ludei of their willingness to fix memory management and 7 required permissions by default.

"Huge" games on mobile are just difficult anyway, since you have much tighter memory and processing capacity. The CocoonJS bug with memory use does make that more difficult, but Crosswalk is not affected and hopefully Ludei can fix CocoonJS soon as well.

Ashley

Another thing I believe C2 lacks is the use of Facebook integration with CocoonJS. I understand Ludei has an API built into CoconJS for Facebook, but I have yet to see a plugin on C2 side.

Crosswalk has only been around a couple of months, and in that time it's already improved a lot and fixed a bunch of bugs....

Crosswalk sounds pretty good, i tested it a bit, but it needs more work, still, lots of promise there, if you guys work together, it will be what exactly we need at moment, doesn't matter if is native or non native or whatever, as long as we know is official supported by you and its not limited, its good.

iOS CooconJS does seem to work better than Android in my case, so its ok, you are limited by memory, their ads network and so on, but its doable.

Optimizations sounds good, beside a few quirks which i still dont understand on performance, i usually get a good performance lately but they are still bits that make no sense, of course i ve been fighting with mobile web html 5, which is a mess for active games, but oh well, lets hope the tech improves.

Also we need a better forum structure on support, now is just a mess tbh. I recommend a few sticky topics which will help a lot in How do i?

Example:

a) Best practices for html 5 web development (performance and proper coding structure)

b) same but for mobile

c) same but for mobile web html 5 (this is one is a pain) here are some looses in performance sometimes that make no sense. Of course its mostly related to young browser and canvas2d, but sometimes i feel lost and there very few answers on the forum, beside the common sense tips. Example: Canvas manipulation on Safari doesnt work well (or maybe i am doing it wrong), no full screen trigger on Safari, tips on how to fill the browser screen, stuff like that. Performance tips and so on.

C2 is easy to use and intuitive for the most, which is the reason we all use it, but to keep a decent performance on some platforms, we need more info, topics, stickies, etc. Of course most of this comes with experience and time, but sometimes its annoying:) For example in my last mobile web html 5 experiment i had so much shutter by just moving 3-4 objects on screen, for no reasons that i found (no ticks events, no endless loops, no crazy collision checks, etc). Of course on point rendering things were better, but Safari doesn't even know that.

The new distribution and publishing subforum its a good idea.

iOS is a big market, we need something on the lines what Crosswalk is doing for Android.

Also we need a better forum structure on support, now is just a mess tbh. I recommend a few sticky topics which will help a lot in How do i?

Example:

a) Best practices for html 5 web development (performance and proper coding structure)

b) same but for mobile

c) same but for mobile web html 5 (this is one is a pain) here are some looses in performance sometimes that make no sense. Of course its mostly related to young browser and canvas2d, but sometimes i feel lost and there very few answers on the forum, beside the common sense tips. Example: Canvas manipulation on Safari doesnt work well (or maybe i am doing it wrong), no full screen trigger on Safari, tips on how to fill the browser screen, stuff like that. Performance tips and so on.

Perhaps also something that the community itself can edit in complement with that(like a wiki, maybe less formal), and also maybe a topic with people that are willing to test on their devices to eventually help people

Ashley until(or ever) theres other export option for iOS, cocoonjs plugin needs more frequent update, besides the big issue like memory management, there are many little issues need to be fixed, iOS facebook share function is missing in C2 plugin, Hide Ad is not working, Show banner on top is buggy. And there seems no documentation on cocoonjs plugin, I have to dig through forum to find answers on how to use cocoonjs plugin.

I'd also like to see swipe feature in touch function, swipe to navigate, there are some tutorial and example on forum, but non works perfectly, would be very useful to have a swipe function build in.

issue with cocoonjs is long overdue, i hope to see some updates on cocoonjs plugin before the major multiplayer feature kicks in.