Unimpressed

Hi,

I were wrong about C2.

I remember how excited I were when it was released. Not only it was a very promising, easy to use, powerful development tool targeted for artists and non developers such as myself but I also wanted to support the independent developers behind it because I respected their enthusiasm and bravery so I became an early adopter.

For a couple weeks I worked on some minor crappy games and happened to build a completely playable canabalt clone.

That was 22 months ago. Today I launched C2 for the first time after 22 months, installed the new version, opened my complete and working canabalt clone project and absolutely nothing works. Every calculating that has worked until now behaves differently the instant I run the project.

Now I can try to debug this mess, probably spending as much time as I did making it in the first place but would you really do that if you were me? I don't care about this game at all actually. Today I were planning to start another project, some sort of an adventure game but why would I keep using a tool that can't open projects newer than 2 years? Would you?

Imagine launching a new version of an adobe program like after effects or premiere and your videos play differently. Of course scirra is no adobe but breaking backwards compatibility is the kind of thing you'd expect from leisure programmers keeping their programs in a neverending beta state.

I'm not going to argue whether or not breaking existing projects during version updates were necessary due to a technical reason. I just don't care. Commercially, you can't expect people to trust your platform when their work may be useless for no reason at all. I still respect the team and their effort here but I no longer trust C2 enough to develop anything with it. I were very wrong to not use a more widely supported platform in the first place.

I'm sure kind people here will try to help me, even ask for my c2 files but I thank you beforehand and will have to reject such offers because having to resort to human help in such situation only confirms the problem with C2. Not gonna gamble my time and work again. I'm also very prejudiced against regulars on any forum; I just don't think people who regular forums can keep their objective view so excuse me if I'm indifferent to your opinions.

If you don't want any assistance, then why even bother to make such a post?

Whilst I defend everyone's right to have there own opinion, this post is just pointless if it is just a case of complaining.

I don't understand why you'd bother.

Software - every software - has problems and quirks.

Did you make a bug report?

Great post. I love it. Hope to read some more soon!

He kinda has a point. It's super annoying. In fact I recently dealing with some Unity programs breaking using Animation class. It's given me all sorts of headaches. I am not impressed with Unity at all. Except I do have to work with Unity at work. And I worked around it. And it's better now. Go figure.

in two years, C2 had some breaking changes (maybe something like 10 at most), those were repertoried in the changelogs each time from what I remember, heck they even let some weird thing stay for the sake of not do breaking changes.

"I'm not going to argue whether or not breaking existing projects during version updates were necessary due to a technical reason. I just don't care. Commercially, you can't expect people to trust your platform when their work may be useless for no reason at all. I still respect the team and their effort here but I no longer trust C2 enough to develop anything with it. I were very wrong to not use a more widely supported platform in the first place."

Commercially you cannot expect to update without knowing what the new version does and expect that it is running fine, it is as simple as that, and is true for any engine out there I think, you either stay on one version all along, or you make modifications relative to what changed between the updates, since there are new features, that are better than the previous ones, and sometimes breaking changes, that you must take in account. It is and had always been like that, and C2 does a good job on it's changelogs too.

Kinda depends on the game..I've got some 3 year old projects that run just fine and others that are completely wasted now. But imo C2 will never be truly stable as it relies too heavily on 3rd parties. For example NodeWebkit/Chrome and browsers are constantly changing and so are your games as a result, so there's a good chance you'll never even know about it unless there's a fuss on these forums somewhere.

If you don't want any assistance, then why even bother to make such a post?

Whilst I defend everyone's right to have there own opinion, this post is just pointless if it is just a case of complaining.

I don't understand why you'd bother.

Software - every software - has problems and quirks.

Well then IGNORE MY POST.

We take backwards compatibility very seriously, and we have made many internal changes over the past 2 years that required extra code to maintain backwards compatibility, and we keep and maintain that extra code indefinitely to ensure projects from as far back as possible can still open and function correctly. However in rare cases (and we try to keep this to as absolutely few cases as possible) we feel an early-on decision was made incorrectly and we then have to trade-off: do we keep it like that forever (and people might make posts like this, but instead complaining "why has this been broken for so long? why don't you just fix it?"), or do we try to fix it as quickly as possible so in the long term it's a better tool, risking introducing some degree of backwards compatibility? Sometimes we choose the former, but whenever we do this we carefully document it in the changelogs and provide advice on how to update your projects accordingly. I think our track record with regular users is good, and in general people who are diligent with updates don't have such serious problems. However going for nearly 2 years without following updates is a different case, especially since you were an early adopter and the software was in a much earlier state of development, and therefore more likely to change. I think we make virtually no breaking changes these days since it's much more mature.

I'm sorry you've had trouble with an old project (and thanks for being an early adopter!), and the option of trawling through changelogs for breaking changes is probably not great. However I gather it still does open and run, so it's not completely hopeless. Sometimes a single breaking changes can cause far-reaching effects and yet have a reasonably straightforward solution, so it may be that a couple of minor tweaks will fix it. I hope you appreciate that while frustrating, this is a tradeoff that is sometimes necessary to prevent going in to the long term with something even worse: a tool bogged down by gotchas and poor design decisions that were never fixed.

Thanks for the response Ashley, appreciated.

Ashley Very well said.

As a software developer, I have to weigh these options too and its not easy. Its not just keeping your users happy, its balancing out maintainability, usability, all kinds of other ilities, developer use, performance, etc....

In the end I would rather the tool/lib I'm using be correct, resulting in changes to my stuff, rather than hoping developers shiv in some code patch to make sure my specific version works the next time I go to change it.

Why does it bother you that your old "crappy" projects doesn't work now? either fix the bugs if you care about the project or make a new a better one, your post is useless if you don't want help, don't want to fix it yourself and only wish to complain about stuff that was made years ago and doesn't work anymore.

Also [quote:3kpcg615]I'm sure kind people here will try to help me, even ask for my c2 files but I thank you beforehand and will have to reject such offers because having to resort to human help in such situation only confirms the problem with C2

Did it ever occur to you that your code might be crap and that's the reason it doesn't work anymore? It seems as you only are able to put the blame on everybody but yourself. Construct 2 was heavily bugged and had a lot of problems under it's 1 to 20 releases(my experience), I think it is very optimistic to think that your project would work after 2 years.

Why does it bother you that your old "crappy" projects doesn't work now? either fix the bugs if you care about the project or make a new a better one, your post is useless if you don't want help, don't want to fix it yourself and only wish to complain about stuff that was made years ago and doesn't work anymore.

The original post already contains your answer so you may want to reread it if you're serious about discussing this topic:

"I don't care about this game at all actually. Today I were planning to start another project, some sort of an adventure game but why would I keep using a tool that can't open projects newer than 2 years? Would you? "

[quote:2yfysru4]

Did it ever occur to you that your code might be crap and that's the reason it doesn't work anymore? It seems as you only are able to put the blame on everybody but yourself. Construct 2 was heavily bugged and had a lot of problems under it's 1 to 20 releases(my experience), I think it is very optimistic to think that your project would work after 2 years.

Not only any C2 user is entitled to be a crappy coder (since it's a piece of software mainly or partly targeted towards non-coders) but also this topic is about the criticism of a commercial product from the viewpoint of the member of a targeted market: the crappy/non coder. Encountering ad hominem in online communities is something I really dislike, doesn't help anyone, prove a point or look good so please stay away from it.

I'll be repeating myself in the following pharagraphs so excuse me for that but I want to be sure I expressed myself properly since I'm not a native speaker and all.

The concept of software evolution may be inevitable, I don't question that yet from a commercial standpoint, C2 did a bad job with the trust of this one non-coder if the last 22 months is to be reference. I know the people behind this tool from this forum, site posts and a couple e-mails and they're clearly honest, hard working, respectable and very good at what they do so I can subjectively say the following 22 months aren't going to be as bad. However I'm a realist and I find it risky to invest my personal time and effort on C2 any further. This isn't something to be angry about and I'm not but I believe it deserves a thread here (which you can delete after some time if you think it'll have a negative impact on C2 commercially but I'm just one random guy posting his opinion here, shouldn't hurt C2 really). I hope I were able to express my criticism and reasoning to post here better this time. I wish the team luck and thank everyone who stayed on topic regardless of whether or not they agreed.

Maybe someone could put up a tutorial listing all known breaking changes since version XX(50? 100?), and users could update it with fixes.

So, if someone's resurrecting an old project of value, they'd have a list of fixes to try.

I can't imagine trawling thru 100 pages of changelogs...

TiAm that is actually a great idea