Scirra false advertising?

I'd agree with Ashley's sentiments. It's not false advertising, just a lack of clarity.

Newt, I been nothing but nice here so not sure what you are laughing at, I'm not being a fanboy either or drinking the Koolaid. And I am not the only the only pointing this out. Check out Spriter forums and Gideros forums there are threads there downing Construct for the advertising. I was trying to bring it to Scirra attention that its not being taken well outside of the reality distortion field.

All those "OPTIONS" in your screen shot are basically the same thing, just packaged slightly different for another programmers product to do the work of making it in to a "real app", I use that term loosely.

Also I own 3 new IOS6 devices and Construct's HTML 5 demo games run like crap on them using the built in Safari. Even my Playbook doesn't run them well or the 8 other Android devices I have, so no HTML 5 web games and mobile do not mix.

2 Ipad 4's and 1 iPhone 5, the games that have any action at all all suck, plain and simple.

HTML 5 is not a gaming platform, unless you want to count how many particles you can put on a screen. That may change, but currently I don't see many AAA html 5 games that are FPS's

I stated in a few threads I praised Scirra for what they (Ashley) have done, but the facts are there isn't a native way to publish and those free 3rd party options may not always be free or available.

Also a whooping 10,000 active users for free until you pay, please thats a low number I have apps with over half a million installs tens of thousands of active users still not banking much from them.

I have over 80 published APPs, not a single one from Construct, you know why because it's a crap shoot to figure out if they will work properly with Cocoon / AppMobi etc.

The IDE's I use to create them I know they will work on the majority of user devices without having to rely on some 3rd party hacks or hand editing code.

So newt, seriously what's so funny again?

How many Construct 2 apps do you have in Google Play or the App Store?

Newt, your game page ? pixelbyter.blogspot.com

I am leaving this thread, because it is turning in to something I did not intend, just more of a public view of other forums about Scirra. I guess the messeger is the evil one in this case so I let you guys be happy in your own little microcosm.

Lol I can't even capture all the platform options.

And he's not near finished with those. Soon there should be Boot to Geko, and I imagine Node for desktop as well.

Complain all you want, but consider the fact that you not only need a license from Apple to publish to Ios, but approval as well.

3rd party options

You are right about a lot, but that's not how I would put it at all. Scirra are a small company, and they simply don't have the time to write all of these exporters. However, the public demanded mobile export and they were given mobile export. Yes, it's a bit dodgy as it uses such a young technology. But the option's there.

I do agree that Scirra should have been more careful with their advertisement of features - it's easy to believe that they offer full export. I'd much rather all the mobile exports be rebranded as 'experimental' as essentially that's what they are.

Regardless of their advertising choices (any larger company would have done the same in a second), Scirra have spent good time making a user friendly product for beginners and prototypers. There's no need to complain as AFAIK they have never said you will be able to create AAA apps and programs right out of the gate. You can, but it will take effort and time. It's never been said that other engines can't export better native apps. They also take much longer to make and are more tedious to program. It's your choice.

The lol is from the fact that there are more ways to export than those shown on the front page, and I couldn't even show all the different options. No one is making fun of anyone here.

As to what I have published, the answer is nonya.

However I enjoy the mechanics development much more than the game dev.

As to poor performance on other systems, perhaps you should post to the forums. It may well be just a matter of your own mechanics there.

My own is actually pretty good, but as stated before it depends on the type of game sometimes.

Also, hope you like the blog, I really need to pay it more attention.

No need for things to get heated. I don't think anyone's trying to be antagonistic here.

As for the performance, construct games can run well but it requires making sure you optimize carefully, avoiding things like overdraw, doing collisions on unnecessary objects, etc. I have an action RPG prototype that runs at a smooth 60 frames per second on an iPhone 4S and iPad 3. It can be done, but it does take some learning of how to optimize for it.

Hmm, I actually thought he had a valid discussion until that little barely-provoked rant at the end, flaming all of us, and then his credibility suddenly and completely evaporated. I wouldn't worry too much about it guys, if anyone is serious about investing time into C2, I'm sure they would dig just a little further and see that 3rd party services are used - no one is hiding anything here.

if anyone is serious about investing time into C2, I'm sure they would dig just a little further and see that 3rd party services are used - no one is hiding anything here.While its not "hiding", front page is giving impression that from making to releasing games for all of those platforms would work out of the box.

I will admit that I first selected this engine due to that assumption, tho now I have dropped that idea and focus making PC/Browser version.

Well, the store page clearly states "Make iOS apps"/"Make android apps", not "Publish natively to...".

And those link to clear tutorials about the method used.

Anyway, Ashley already said they will clear out things on the home page.

CoffeeOD - I think as a whole this topic has been blown out of proportion. Firstly, before you commit to any product/service etc.. you need to do your own due diligence. There are far worse advertising schemes out there that are clear breaches of the Fair Trading Act (or whatever the equivalent is in your country). C2 in my opinion is not remotely approaching anything like that.

Secondly, for a full license it's 79 Euros (I think). That's hardly going to break the bank, and even then you can download the free edition to play around with the exporters, and do an evaluation for yourself. That's what I did before purchasing my full license.

CoffeeOD - I think as a whole this topic has been blown out of proportion. Firstly, before you commit to any product/service etc.. you need to do your own due diligence. There are far worse advertising schemes out there that are clear breaches of the Fair Trading Act (or whatever the equivalent is in your country). C2 in my opinion is not remotely approaching anything like that.

Secondly, for a full license it's 79 Euros (I think). That's hardly going to break the bank, and even then you can download the free edition to play around with the exporters, and do an evaluation for yourself. That's what I did before purchasing my full license.

EyeHawk I think its good to discuss about any confusion/problem with product and for community (old, new or future) its nice to see that developers are doing their best in all situations, it shows that they actually listen and care which I cant say for certain developers out there.

Not sure if you understood my point there, since it was nowhere near negative as your reply might makes it look or Im just taking it wrong way (if so, I apologize). I understand situation and personally did not have any problems to find out that outside HTML5 its third party road.

My only "complain" was that front page should inform about that third party progmans, which from my understanding Ashley is working on to improve. I dont really see anything wrong about adding some sort of "statement" to cover third party requirement for publishing games to X platform, its clear and fast way to avoid future akward situations like this.

Personally I got C2 just for HTML5 publishing.

all the other export functions are extra jam!

I think that C2 can successfully manage to export to Windows desktop + Mac OSX + Linux using the Node-Webkit toolset. Windows8 already provides a good layer for html5 apps, and C2 has already made good use of that feature.

It seems that Blackberry is interested in the C2 technology and we might get a seamless export for BB10 too.

All that, for a 1 time price is already way too good if you ask me!

Who knows maybe in 2013 new technologies will come out that will make it possible to wrap html5 games for mobile, for free, like Node-Webkit does today for desktops

CoffeeOD - no that statement wasn't specifically aimed at you, it was a general observation. It's just a bit of a pet peeve of mine that some people don't bother to take responsibility for themselves.

Also I own 3 new IOS6 devices and Construct's HTML 5 demo games run like crap on them using the built in Safari.

Can you elaborate further on this? The stock Space Blaster demo runs very well on both an iPad 2 and iPad 3 with iOS 6 for me, virtually never dropping below 30 FPS. And at times it has a great deal going on with many animated sprites using blending on-screen at once. What we've seen with mobile devices with preliminary support WebGL is very promising too, since on desktop our WebGL renderer can be 2-10 times faster than canvas 2D and I expect to see similar performance gains on mobile. So I think canvas 2D is perfectly viable already, but support will get even better in future.

I think there may be an effect that since Construct 2 makes it so easy to throw in loads of sprites with its visual editor, you end up giving it more content than even a native engine could deal with. (Canvas 2D in iOS 5+ is hardware accelerated, so rendering probably happens about equally fast as a native engine.) The iPad 3 has quad-core graphics, but a modern desktop graphics card could have around 1000-core graphics... so for some rendering tasks, desktop graphics are literally hundreds of times faster! Do you think this could explain part of the difference?

To everyone else: there's no need to criticise straybullet, sometimes negative feedback is valuable. Our own forums probably do a good job of filtering out people who don't like Construct 2, so it's rare we hear from them, and there may be things we can do to help resolve the criticisms and improve the product.

Well, the store page clearly states "Make iOS apps"/"Make android apps", not "Publish natively to...".

And those link to clear tutorials about the method used.

Anyway, Ashley already said they will clear out things on the home page.

I'm not going to lie... that was reaching Kyatric. C2 seems to be made for people without too much programming/technical knowledge and overall casual game creators. So "Make iOS/Android apps" reads the same as "Publish natively to..." to the intended demographic.

Glad to hear it will be cleared up though. As someone who bought C2 thinking I would be able to create apps much easier than it is and part of that casual demographic I do agree a lot of what's on the homepage was misleading. I'm just being honest. I do love the program and it has pretty much made me not care as much to publish to mobile but my original intention was to do so.

As long as we're honest as possible about the product, the feedback will shape up C2 (an already great product) to become a much much better product in the end.

I realise that this topic is pretty-much done, but I thought I'd throw in my 2c anyway...

I started using Construct 2 a few months ago. I've played around with other game creation tools and experienced their native exporting to various platforms so I'll admit that I was pretty taken aback when I discovered that C2's exporting requires a bit of a runaround. But I didn't let it bother me, because I found that the tool itself was pretty darn good and was exactly what I've been looking for (basically an alternative to GM). So a couple of weeks ago, happy with the program and keen to step it up a notch, I decided to buy a personal licence, knowing full-well what C2 is and is not capable of (and, admittedly, also hoping for future native exporting when the time comes). The information regarding exporters is not hidden; it's freely available for anyone who takes a few minutes to read a couple of tuts or manual entries.

With that said, I agree that it should be clarified on the main page for those customers who jump in without taking a full look around, but, speaking just for myself, it's not a big deal how it is now. It's the Internet; I'm cautious of any piece of software out there, let alone one that I have to pay $120 for.