Inventing on Principle

My first post! <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I watched this excellent talk by Bret Victor, and thought that the segment from 10:40 till 16:45 shows an approach in direct feedback while creating games, that would be an awesome (and eye-catching) feature.

vimeo.com/36579366

The one thing I miss in Contruct 2 is direct feedback: run your game, change variables, run your game again, test, stop, trial and error, ad infinitum. A very old-fashioned approach, and having a similar "preview and change while you preview" would raise Construct 2 to an entire new level not yet seen before in any other game creator (as far as I can remember).

Should not be too difficult to implement? nudge, nudge, wink, wink <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> ?

That was great talk.

Saw it. Great presentation and ideas.

I used once a real-time css viewer which was a cool experience.

This approach is not free of bad elements. Imagine you program and while you do you write something you didn't mean only to find out it moved all files from location X and renamed all their names to "Avocado", for example. Since this is happening in real-time without the need to press "compile" or "Run" it could be too late before you notice the bug.

Beside this, it's a cool environment for a programmer.

... having a similar "preview and change while you preview" would raise Construct 2 to an entire new level not yet seen before in any other game creator (as far as I can remember)...

Unity lets you do this... to mitigate any issues that might crop up, everything changes back once you stop the "simulation."

Agreed, would be very cool, but probably hard to implement in Construct.

ShiVa (at least the Advanced version) also does this "changing values on the fly" trick. Not an easy feature to implement, no nudge, no wink.

This guy in the video... nice. But. When he talks about accidental discoveries many people might miss that he was doing something meaningful, going from point A to point B in development and he knew both what he was doing and where he was going. This trick didn't remove the need to code. This trick, as demonstrated, can help coders under certain circumstances. But it's not a panacea and can't be intended to remove the need of any coding by giving no-coders means to fiddle with code written by others.

Chaos. Mayhem. Destruction. I'd love to see the results untrained of people dealing with such a feature like they would press the "Make Me A Cool Game" button. Beautiful!

And, well, I'm just one of those who "just play computer well in their heads".

Dismissing years of training and conditioning, "just" because, wasn't so nice.

Pays the bills, gets jobs done.

Gets people to call you a Mentat.

Others "just" make nice speeches.

In fact, using JS and HTML with C2 is already some kind of "live preview". When you create games or apps with "traditionnal" frameworks (usually some mix of native code : C++/C/ObjC or Java), you code, you compile & link. Then you launch your binary. It crashes, you debug and fix it, and you go back to step 1. That kind of workflow is squeezed with C2.

I just would like to state that for strict "value seeing" you could use either Log objects to console by wgfunstorm (works in chrome and FF's consoles) or Debug panel by rexrainbow.

Those two custom plugins allow you to set some "watchpoints" over variables and/or objects.

From the first plugin, I believe you can modify the values from the browser's console. (not sure though, I haven't tried so far).

At worst, you can "code" your own "debug screen" in which you would modify values for specific elements of your choice.

So it is "already possible" atm, just require a bit of planning ahead/know what you do.

Edit: After seeing the conference the tools he provides are pretty cool, but applying it to C2 would end up in rewriting the whole software pretty much from scratch.

It's not "a simple feature to add", far from it.