Timeframe for EXE exporter?

I'd just like to point out that there's no such thing as a gig game.

Anything that big would have an exe that's some mere megabytes, and the rest is resources.

newt, this is the truth. What Ashley said about CC, that a 1GB game is too much, I dunno what he was referring to. I remember in my RPG Maker 2k3 days, I've made a 550MB game, and as primitive as RM2k3 is, didn't seem to have a problem. This game also had 120 layouts.

The truth is that my game is big, because of the resources. I mean, music are the heaviest resources in the game, for the most part, some images might be big, but I plan to not make them to so, if possible. Sound FXs, there's gonna be a lot. Sprites do not weight anything significant. Sure, the game has a lot layouts, I dunno how this affects the performance of CC or C2. If you look at the right of This menu, all of those options, except for "Quit" and "Back", are all different layouts, in this menu alone there's 9. And maybe more layouts, INSIDE the options, but I'm not sure. Other than resources, what else can impact the size of a game, so greatly, that it is too much for CC or C2? Can layouts weight a game down?

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It all depends on how you lay out your project.

I have a team right now, who are working on a serious project using CC, and feasibly this thing might be a little unworldly. We already have 3D projected entities using 2D objects, and a 3D "point cloud" system. The game assets are going to be in the hundreds of Mb, if not even in the Gb by the time we get there...

You have to "modularize" your project. Make sure your assets are not embedded in the EXE itself, rather kept externally (encrypted or not, your choice). Make sure you are using methods for optimising what assests are loaded into memory, and when. All of these things can help make a game really any size you want... you just have to be clever with the way you splice everything together. I have even seen people make a game using several EXE's... which one EXE can quit itself and load another.

Clever boys and girls can make the best anything ;)

~Sol

SoldjahBoy: Reading this, it shouldn't be a problem. I do not plan on: Music and Sound FXs embedded. Sprites yes, and lay out elements too. These should not take up much space. I am not trying to make 3D here either, just 2D. The heaviest resources will be external anyway. I do not think it should be a problem?

I really do need EXE exporter,

because most of my friends still use IE7, and don't know how to download/install Firefox/Chrome....

What? Seriously? Installing Chrome or Firefox is easier than installing your typical game. All you have to do is hit the big blue thing on google.com/chrome or download FF in your language from mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html and execute the install package.

Besides, your friends are at a high security risk if they do not update their IE to latest version.

Browser share is a thing I think time will fix - after a year or two I'm sure IE8 and earlier will become the new IE6.

Try making a game using one of the 'fullscreen in browser' options. Then hit F11. In the top 3 major browsers, you're now playing in hardware-accelerated fullscreen. Fullscreen gaming is perfectly possible in HTML5. The main barrier is people aren't used to it - like you say you assume you need an EXE to play fullscreen, but it's perfectly possible to do it in a browser, you probably have just never hit F11 to play a fullscreen browser game before.

I'm aware that you can go fullscreen in browsers. Chrome seems to do it best, but still causes issues when the mouse hovers near the top of the screen (while testing my breakout clone, a little item scrolls onto the screen informing me that I can leave fullscreen by hitting F11 again... in the process I lose mouse control... and my ball sails right past the paddle... 1 life lost, thanks Chrome.)

Firefox's idea of fullscreen appears to include leaving a menubar at the top of the screen and the windows taskbar down the bottom... unless there's an option for "actual" fullscreen that I haven't found.

To be honest I haven't used Internet Explorer since the late 90's, so I'm not sure how it handles it.

Browsers always have been, and always will be quirky. There'll always be inconsistencies between the browsers, and I'll likely have to accommodate the fact that people will stick to their browser of choice, rather than the one that plays my game better. This is ironic, in that html5 games are supposed to be platform independent, but have become somewhat reliant on the browser they are being played in, merely moving the "platform" variable one step further along. Games will now run on a Mac and PC, as long as those Macs and PCs are running latest generation browsers. This is fine for certain things, but it's a trade off nonetheless.

The recent update that allows fullscreen zooming is pretty awesome, and I implemented it the second I updated, but even with the superior aspect ratio handling compared to CC, it still results in a game that is unreleasable because of issues running it within the browser environment. And my crisp and chunky pixel graphics are unavoidably blurred with the linear scaling that I can't turn off (I'm sure it will be possible to choose nearest neighbour in the future... maybe).

I understand and agree that focusing on html5 (at least for now) is the best choice for a small company with limited resources - putting those resources into the features that are likely to create mass appeal, and the ability to make games that have the least impediments to getting the gaming equivalent of "bums on seats" (I guess it's still bums on seats?)... realistically, browser games made in Construct2 are more likely to be played by the majority of people than the equivalent exe games, and it's quite true that the majority of people who use Construct to make games will only ever make small, short attention span type games. And maybe in the future, the distinction between operating system and web browser will be gone entirely... and everyone will be running a Chrome OS, and all apps will run inside, side by side and on top of the browser environment... even Construct will be a browser based application, and you'll be able to run browsers inside browsers!

Honestly, I don't think that revolution has happened yet, or is likely to happen quite so soon - and even if it would be awesome, I still hope the current generation of games aren't hobbled by being too far ahead of their time.

I'm all in favour of an Exe wrapper (essentially it would be an html5 browser that doesn't do anything except run the game, correct?) as a temporary work-around. As an optional plugin, I don't think your fears that people would be confused about it are anything to worry about assuming the exporter is clearly labelled as "HTML5 Application" or something along those lines. If it can get around some of the 3rd party browser hassles, then I'll beta test the bejesus out of it.

HTML5 is unlikely to ever out-perform a native EXE, so there's still a solid case to make an EXE exporter for performance reasons.

That goes without saying.

Also, thanks for staying in the conversation that I'm sure you're sick to hell of by now.

I'm aware that you can go fullscreen in browsers. Chrome seems to do it best, but still causes issues when the mouse hovers near the top of the screen

The Mouse Lock API would probably fix this.

irefox's idea of fullscreen appears to include leaving a menubar at the top of the screen and the windows taskbar down the bottomSeems to work here - you just have to wait a moment and the menu bar at the top slides away and then you're totally fullscreen. Same with IE9.

y crisp and chunky pixel graphics are unavoidably blurred with the linear scaling that I can't turn off

I'm also aware this is a major problem, and I have in fact been trying to make noises at the standards committee to properly support this, and they seemed receptive, but it may take time to sort out.

rowsers always have been, and always will be quirky.

Only with new features, and HTML5 is the bleeding edge. For example, in the latest generation of browsers, I think you'll be hard pressed to find any CSS2 quirks - at least none that matter, anyway. So once HTML5 has been around a while I think it will be pretty solid - it's only a matter of time.

In other words, I think every single concern raised in this thread will be solved, it's only a matter of time. These problems do exist, but they exist because HTML5 is so new. Once it's had some time to mature, all these problems will be solved. Don't look at where HTML5 is, look at where it's going.

Perhaps we can look in to an official EXE wrapper after all. But if the problems of HTML5 get fixed soon, what's the point? The only real advantage of an EXE that I can see is the speed, and if you're embedding a browser in an EXE, you don't get any extra speed! It's no faster than a browser on the web. Then you get the disadvantage of trying to persuade a security-conscious public to download an EXE file and OK all the security warnings they get.

So try looking at it from my point of view: the way things are going, an EXE wrapper around HTML5 provides some disadvantages, and no advantages.

lso, thanks for staying in the conversation that I'm sure you're sick to hell of by now.

No worries, it's an interesting subject! <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle">

Perhaps we can look in to an official EXE wrapper after all. But if the problems of HTML5 get fixed soon, what's the point?

So try looking at it from my point of view: the way things are going, an EXE wrapper around HTML5 provides some disadvantages, and no advantages.

Steam isn't an advantage? <img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I think an official .exe wrapper using Awesomium would be moderately easy. Combined with something like UPX you could support a single exe binary for Linux, Windows, and Mac exports right off the bat.. Plus it is based on Chrome so would have good performance, sound compatibility, etc.

I've been wanted to make a wrapper generator which takes a C2 folder and generates a .exe but just too busy!! :-(

I think asking for EXE exporter it's too early for C2, due c2 still get features from time to time, when C2 got must of features I think Ashley will able to create an official exe exporter easy later than now, which will make update have parallel works one for HTML5 and EXE, not mention fixing bugs for each of them ( double the works and slow C2 updates )

BTW: I still think getting an official EXE, more worth than HTML5 Wrapper one.

> I think asking for EXE exporter it's too early for C2

Yeah, second this. Would rather see C2 get families, branching, better system expressions (tokenizing strings), etc.

An official exe is clearly superior to a wrapper. The only point of the wrapper to me is the novelty of trying something new, plus it has its places for a stopgap until an official exe exporter arrives. For the wrapper to be done right, would need a way to customize the index.html file before wrapping otherwise you end up with a weird looking game screen (for example space game with white border doesn't look good). Still, I'd rather have more cool features in C2 than a wrapper right now.

I think a good installer / uninstaller placing the icons on Start Menu, System Variables and with the chance to recognize MAC OS, Linux and make the same things.

The offline button is a nice workaround as instead.

would need a way to customize the index.html file before wrapping otherwise you end up with a weird looking game screen (for example space game with white border doesn't look good)

The best way to do it would be to enable fullscreen-in-browser then just set the window size of the EXE. It should then take up the whole window with no border.

A wrapper might not be that straightforward either: you might have heard browsers block the features necessary for auto-flip/auto-mirror and a few other things on the file:/// protocol. This might mean these features don't work in an EXE wrapper either! To get around that we'd have to build in a local HTTP server, and now a "simple" wrapper is getting a bit complicated...

Plus, the only advantage of an EXE wrapper that I can tell is that you can submit to steam, as SullyTheStrange pointed out. I am not aware of any advantages, only the disadvantages of discouraging security warnings to download and play the game, and unnecessarily tieing your game to Windows. Please tell me if there are other advantages I'm not aware of! Because right now it seems the disadvantages outweigh the small advantage (I doubt many people will be publishing to steam in these early days).

Please do go and experiment with third party EXE wrappers yourself though - I'd be interested to hear how it goes.

I think an official .exe wrapper using Awesomium would be moderately easy. Combined with something like UPX you could support a single exe binary for Linux, Windows, and Mac exports right off the bat.. Plus it is based on Chrome so would have good performance, sound compatibility, etc.

I've been wanted to make a wrapper generator which takes a C2 folder and generates a .exe but just too busy!! :-(

This has been on my mind constantly for the last few days.

I've been thinking about what is really important when it comes to the delivery method of the game. And, in the end Ashley's assurance that all the current annoyances and limitations of browsers would eventually be fixed just didn't reassure me. I think maybe the thing that really bothers me is that browsers do other things... many things at once - and almost all of these things conflict with the purpose of playing the game.

It's like the difference between watching a movie on TV, and watching it in the cinema. Control over the environment is an important part of the presentation of any media, and when movies are sliced up by advertising and cropped to fit a small screen... you're essentially fighting for the attention of the viewer, and often losing.

While all of the annoyances that I previously mentioned are part of this, the biggest is essentially that a browser is the TV, an EXE is the cinema, and an HTML5 EXE wrapper is a DVD/BluRay... so to speak.

They can all present the media to the viewer, and they all have different advantages/disadvantages... it would be a sad day if the film industry were to decide, since the future is in digital media, to stop screening films in cinemas.

I would build an Awesomium wrapper myself if I wasn't such a dunce when it comes to setting up Visual Studio (it's almost like they designed it to be a pain in the arse) and had more spare time to learn the basics. Surely, building an application that does nothing but load a single web page (ie, your index.html) would be fairly easy (any takers?).

It would be a start, at least until an official exporter is (or isn't) added.