Construct 2 - Realistic State after 1 gazilion downloads

Arima / stefanos - gents, that wasn't aimed at you! Arima, I thought your responses were particularly well balanced and reflected my own views, especially page 2 - I don't think I would have been quite so polite or eloquent if I had tried to say the same!

This is my second go at writing this post because the stupid editor logged me out and deleted my text (wft? twice in one day!) .

I re-read the thread and I don't think I can support my assertion that anyone appeared to show a lack of appreciation. Neck - winding in.... Perhaps I suffer from having too much empathy with Ashley because we were all out to criticize his baby and his business decisions.

However, I really do think it's important to talk about C2's shortcomings. Especially those areas where the Scirra website front page assertions differ somewhat from C2's true capabilities. I just hope to avoid being slain by accusations that it's my coding technique that is the only thing between me now and me making a bad piggies android clone...

High quality, polished mobile apps can do well in today's gaming market.

All personal preferences aside, it can be seen that mobile games, done well, can make a lot of money...which in turn can allow one to continue making great games for people to enjoy.

A rather short but intriguing article about today's state of mobile games:

http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/this-is-how-much-money-free-apps-actually-make/story-fn6vihic-1226825724686

By scrolling down a bit you can see average daily incomes of the current batch of top mobile games.

All I need is a powerful engine that can produce quality apps, I'm still hoping that somehow, someway, Construct 2 is the exact engine that I'm looking for...--

Has anyone tried the Antares Universe with the Unity 2d Engine?

It seems a very compelling offering...no coding required, accelerated production, and great performing games being made with it...Sounds Awesome!

I haven't but this (http://plyoung.com/plyblox/) is pretty good for unity if you're into the visual scripting stuff. Notably it allows you to make your own events if you can code so you can extend functionality. But C2 strength comes more from behaviors and plugins than the visual scripting stuff, so to that end you're better off in finding a 'Kit' for the type of game you're trying to make.

Doesn't look quite as powerful as Universe, but I guess it could work.

I'm just looking for an end to end solution, that is, from inception to publishing, that can compete with the best of the best -

Mostly, I don't want my final product to look like it was made with a kit or a half-baked publishing solution or anything that doesn't give breathe of real quality. -

I want it to look and feel like a polished, professional mobile app, not an imitation or on a lesser wrung of quality...that's all. -

STARTECHSTUDIOS & Juryiel - those are both very interesting solutions to the Unity code writing nightmare. I think you've both found me something to tinker with over the next couple of weeks as a means to avoid working on my C2 game, which I'm feeling a bit bogged down by... I tried Playmaker a while ago and, as will all things Unity, that seemed quite complicated but also quite a comprehensive solution to the 'I don't want to learn code' issue. Maybe one of these are what I've been searching for...

I do code, but I find Construct 2 so much faster which is why I like it, but if it can't make really great stuff for the public - then...Why am I using it??

I do code, but I find Construct 2 so much faster which is why I like it, but if it can't make really great stuff for the public - then...Why am I using it??

Well right, plyBox and plyGame are still beta, I was just showing its setup basically matches C2 fairly closely in terms of the event driven system, whereas universe is different, and may be less intuitive (I'm not sure). But because it has most of the basic stuff done and also allows you to make your own event block types you can do quite a lot even at this stage. May be worth waiting longer if you don't want to do a bunch of your own coding. I personally use Kits anyway for the specific game genre I want to make. Those are usually more specific and can produce games more quickly but at the cost of flexibility.

This may also be useful to Arima given the health issues mentioned.

All this talk about C2 not being able to make larger complex games on mobiles... not true. I came to C2 with no former programming or art background.

My first game idea was a huge RPG at HD res (some would say its a mistake to aim big as a noob, I think learning as you go helps a lot), and I stumbled and learnt my way around. When it finished months later, it was 83MB, wouldn't even run with CocoonJS due to its limitations (which I wasn't aware of at the time, my fault!). By trimming it down and changing a lot of assets into PNG8 (which turns out looking 95-99% the same as PNG32), shortening the music loops, removing a few sprites and BG, it went down to 27MB, but still CocoonJS had trouble since it took 450MB of free ram due to it loading all assets into ram at the start. It would run on Tegra 3 devices at 25fps, I thought that was the limitation of HTML5 and accepted my fate.. but its not true, after more optimizations, it now runs on the the same device at 50-60 fps!

Even better recently with Crosswalk, max of 250MB ram required only. I am not saying my game is a great example of game development, polish, artistic sense or whatever (I had to trim a lot of the art and effects to get it to run well on mobiles). I am just saying its a huge game with over 3,600 events and it runs very well even on older mobiles (HTC Incredible S with a 1ghz Dual-Core and 512mb ram, 800x480 res).

See how busy the gameplay is:

Now its no Airscape or Penelope, but with being designed for mobiles and the limitations, there's no way you are going to get those games running smooth on older mobiles.

My current project is a massive space sci-fi sandbox!

http://halfgeekstudios.wordpress.com/

Don't think such complex games are possible via html5/C2 on mobiles? I will prove its possible, alpha gameplay is already smooth on my Tegra 3.

My only gripes is the lack of AdMob and Google Store integration for C2/Intel XDK currently but its coming soon, something to look forward to when my current project is finished.

In summary, my opinion is that for smaller games, CocoonJS is actually fantastic for Android and iOS, but bigger games is where it falls flat on its face due to poor memory management, but its something Crosswalk can do (for Android only). Know the limitations and work within and around them.

All this talk about C2 not being able to make larger complex games on mobiles... not true.

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant when talking about a large game. Complex games with thousands of events are certainly possible on mobile as it is (music problems and such notwithstanding). Large games, and by that I mean games that take up a lot of memory, aren't, for the very reason you struggled with - C2 loading all images at once. 250 mb is not at all a small amount for a mobile game - as far as I know, iOS is already throwing memory warnings at that point. Optimizing, reducing color palette and resolution will only go so far.

Loot pursuit, my rpg, was also running smoothly with over 3,000 events, but as soon as I added too many images, it started crashing. I wasn't even halfway through the game at that point, maybe a third. No amount of optimization will make it run on iOS unless something is done about the images all being loaded at startup.

(music problems and such notwithstanding)

what kind of music problems are you referring to? start times? or something like syncing problems?

Arima

That is a problem with CocoonJS, its lack of layout-by-layout memory management is a killer blow for large complex games.

I have not tried Ejecta for iOS but it apparently handles memory load better. For iOS we can only hope Ludei improve CocoonJS major weakness. For Android, Crosswalk is heaps better now, with the final major issue fixed: sound volume/controls!

Crosswalk only load into ram what you use on your layout, I use a lot of big animated sprites that's why my ram usage is so high. 250MB means it will run on most 512mb ram devices, that gives you only really ancient devices in which it cannot run, but even then, a native engine is not going to make it better when you have that much assets. Each 2048 x 2048 sprite sheet requires 16mb of ram regardless of how you do it, if you have a lot and they need multiple sheets...

Edit: I have no problem with demanding the device have 250MB of ram free. Most older stuff on the market have 512mb and can handle that. On iOS it gives you a memory warning but it wont crash unless you use beyond what it has free. I had to double check that and other devs say it specifically. Devices from 2 years ago come with 1gb of ram.

—, there's a difference between RAM and VRAM. Arima said the entire game is loaded into RAM but with layout-by-layout only the current layout is loaded into VRAM.

There's no difference for mobiles as I am aware, they use the total system ram to load assets as it acts as a vram buffer as well (similar to iGPUs in Intel and AMD APU, reliant on system ram). Correct me if I am wrong though.

All I know is that with CocoonJS and the peak 450mb ram usage, it would not run on devices with 768MB of ram or less, but ran on devices with 1GB of ram.

With Crosswalk and the 250mb peak usage, it now runs on all the 512mb devices I have tested.

Well whew, with all this discussion going about; I'm going to commit my next project to public progress. And to make everything interesting the game will primarily developed targeting Tegra2 device using CrossWalk compile.

Let's put the mobile performance matter to the test. I will let everyone know what I'm doing, how I'm going about it. I will also listen to peoples suggestions for performance and design improvements.

I'll put up or use my previous website for this.