Download Construct 2 release 38

[s:2te0pjpk]Download Construct 2 public preview 38[/s:2te0pjpk]

Link to release 37

Edit: Seems to be a botched build, update coming soon... if you're feeling adventurous you can still try downloading here.

Tiled background is new to this build! First, though, a little bit of eye candy: it's a minor cosmetic change, but objects in the editor now have full edge smoothing. It looks like antialiasing, but technically isn't quite the same (it's sort of blending the edges with the background). Just a nice-to-have.

<img src="http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases/r38a.png">

You can also set the browser you want to launch for preview in project properties. Right now, I'd recommend Internet Explorer 9 even if it's not your day-to-day browser - it definitely has the fastest and best quality canvas at the moment. You can get it via Windows Update on Vista or 7. On XP, Firefox 4 seems to be next best. Chrome is an excellent browser overall but its canvas is a little behind the others - it's a bit slow and pixellated. I'm sure they'll catch up eventually though.

So: tiled background. This has two big improvements over the Classic tiled background:

• You can rotate it!
• There is no power-of-two requirement!

For the second point (power-of-two) - Classic couldn't tile non-power-of-two textures (NPOT) properly. Modern graphics cards have supported NPOT textures for a while now. C2's OpenGL renderer has been designed to take full advantage of this. This means textures of any size tile seamlessly at any zoom or angle. All browsers except Safari can do the same too (I'm sure Safari will fix theirs soon). Even Sprites are using NPOT textures behind the scenes. In short, in C2, you can forget about power-of-two textures completely. There's no change in functionality or VRAM saving whatsoever!

One more thing: whenever we get round to an OpenGL (desktop) exporter for C2, both the edge-smoothing and NPOT tiled background will carry over to that as well, since it'll use the same renderer.

Changelog

• [Add] Tiled background plugin. Rotatable, seamless and no power-of-two requirement.
• [Add] 'Preview browser' setting to project properties. Can choose which browser launches out of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, providing they're installed, or leave at system default browser. The setting persists, which is great if like me you want to browse the web in Chrome, but use IE9's canvas for preview, which is better right now.
• [Change] Insert Object dialog now groups plugins in to their categories.
• [Change] Layout view: Sprites previously had half-smoothed edges in the editor (sort of like antialiasing but cut off half way). They now have full-smoothed edges for better quality.
• [Change] Rearranged layer properties in to two groups - editor properties (only affect its use in the editor) and layer properties (affect the layer at runtime).

awsome!

Said I had an error loading exporter? Can't open C2. Anyone else get that?

Got the following errors when i try to start the program

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22173473/c2error.png">

yes, i got the same errors

Same here. Did you run C2 on Windows XP?

It works for me on my Windows 7 dev machine, but I might have accidentally added in a Vista/7-only feature. Can anyone confirm it works OK on Vista/7? I'm not sure what it is I've done but I'll pick through my changes and figure it out.

First, though, a little bit of eye candy: it's a minor cosmetic change, but objects in the editor now have full edge smoothing. It looks like antialiasing, but technically isn't quite the same (it's sort of blending the edges with the background). Just a nice-to-have.

Sweet! Does this method incur a performance hit? Since depending on the situation it might be preferable to have it turned off and up the fps.

If it doesn't, how does it achieve that? Does it basically put a 1 pixel border around the texture, like how that solves the edges without anti-aliasing in C1?

Also, works fine here on Vista.

I've found a Vista function I accidentally used that broke XP support. Fix coming shortly.

Arima: it will probably incur a small performance hit, but I don't think it will be significant. It effectively puts a 1-pixel transparent border around the texture, but without changing the texture (by tweaking the texture co-ordinates and draw quad). That's a little bit of math but there's no reason it can't be pre-processed for the runtime to make any performance impact very small.