The sad truth of Construct 2

jayderyu "We can't access Steam Achievements".

...out of curiosity, why do you need Steam Achievements?

Ashley

A superb explanation of Scirra's smart decisions! What about making it a blog post? It really deserves more visibility than it gets in this thread.

Let more people know how much they're benefitting from the greatest hockey players in the business ;)

haha...what he said.

i don't right now, but my next game I will. I also listed the Hydra achievement board and Ouya ODK. Also I did mention monetization through Ouya is a must. Which I can't access through HTML5. So it's really not just about Steam.

still think Scirra should do a kickstarter to gain funding for a 1 year staff to make the Exporter Development Kit

It is not a bad idea.

There's no technical reason HTML5 apps can't access native features on a non-browser platform. Things like PhoneGap have shims to access native stuff from Javascript, Windows 8 works similarly, and the whole design of CocoonJS is forwarding JS calls to native. So not being able to use native features isn't a fundamental limitation of HTML5 - it's just a few extra technical steps are necessary.

Ashley - are there plans to support more of those features in C2 itself? Because the official node webkit plugin is missing quite a lot of what node webkit can do, it requires using those third party plugins. It would be nice if it was all incorporated into the official plugin.

Perhaps, but as I described in another thread, we'd prefer to design it so it interoperates nicely with ordinary web browsers, which generally will take longer.

Ashley your statement seems a bit contradictory - these features would naturally be specific to Node-webkit export, wouldn't they?

Ashley You say a lot of reasonable stuff, but I still have my doubts that HTML5 will ever perform at the level of native apps on mobile devices.

1. Running a game through a browser just eats up more resources than it needs to. Does it not? If I'm running mobile safari on an iPad, is it not having to process the game PLUS the browser? It's eating up processing power that could be used by the game. The browser is the middle man.

2. Apple may *never* fully support HTML5, because Apple likes to dominate their corner of the market. Do you really think that Apple will enable webGL and continue improving HTML5 support if it could mean losing a ton of money from app developers going the HTML5 route and circumventing the app store?

I very much wish to eat my words and be totally wrong about everything, but it isn't looking good to me. I know you had to choose a direction and run with it, but I feel like you're defending HTML5 partly because it's what you went with. You even said yourself that there are lots of problems with browser support, etc... yet Scirra boasts that Construct 2 is a direct competitor to other game development tools that export natively. This just isn't true.

I don't think I'd have so much of a problem with Construct 2 if it was just advertised as an HTML5 game maker with a warning that it's not really meant for top end mobile games. Instead it's marketed as a replacement to native apps. Also I just think Construct 2 is so damn good... and I just want to create native games with it and get maximum potential from it. :( There's no possibility of hiring someone to work on the exporters on the side somehow? Not even if we kickstart it?

HTML 5 (and web technologies in general) is definitely the right strategy. May be we have to wait a couple of years until it reaches its full potential on mobile devices, but for desktop browsers it just works very well, even more powerful than flash.

sigh. lost my long winded post. I'm not writing it again :( instead just enjoy the sample of rendering performance done in this link.

muizelaar.blogspot.ca/2011/02/drawing-sprites-canvas-2d-vs-webgl.html

summary: WebGL for mobile has been waiting since late 2010. Apple has used it since IOS 4x for the last 2 and a half years. Android and Chrome are not the same team and don't really work together. It is unlikely we wil see WebGL implemented in the next 2 to 3 years on mobile.

too much speculation, but food for thought

techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/google-chrome-android

thread on the apple forums

discussions.apple.com/thread/3609881

both from 2011 and both seem to lead that neither Google and Apple are going to push WebGL our high render performance out very quickly.

anyways been a great discussion thread :) when CocoonJS comes out wit WebGL maybe we can finally get somewhere... it's just the painful wait.

Here's an interesting presentation to add to the topic:

Trends in interactive design 2013

a bit off topic, why it's called html5? I mean html was always html, no html 2, 3 or 4... why suddenly html5? due to this "revolution" ?

It's called HTML5 because the previous specification was HTML4. The reason it's getting so much attention now is because the step from 4 to 5 is bigger than the previous specification steps have been. At least IIRC.

To chime in on this whole discussion. Meh.

Ashley has been right so far about C2 and HTML5. We've seen huge increases in performance since the C2 beta stages. Would a completely native solution be nice? Yes. Do I think it's fully necessary? Possibly not.

Personally I don't care about iOS at all. So that point for me is moot. The only platform other than web/windows I'm interested in is Ouya, and it's far too early to say anything conclusively on that yet (which is why I'm, begrudgingly, looking at Game Maker again. Just in case.).

As the saying goes. The right tools for the right job.

Flash is the past, HTML5 is the future!

JeZ+Lee