Welcome to the Construct 2 public preview

<img src="http://www.scirra.com/images/c2cog.png"><img src="http://www.scirra.com/images/html5.png">

Overview

Welcome to the Construct 2 public preview! Development was previously done privately, and we're moving to public development now, for broader feedback and testing. Please get involved! If you're wondering what will happen to the old Construct, you probably haven't read this yet.

New features in Construct 2

There are a lot of changes and new features in C2. The big news is that it primarily exports to HTML5. The changes are outlined in this thread.

State of development

This public preview is effectively a pre-alpha. C2 does not yet have much capability - the demo below is very simple and it is difficult to make anything much more complicated than that. C2 is currently defined more by what it doesn't have than what it has - there are no private variables, behaviors, event groups, event includes, families, very few plugins with very few actions, conditions and expressions, no image editor, animations, and so on. If something's missing, it's just that we haven't got there yet. (0.x was around a quarter of a million lines of code.) Our approach to development has been to get to some useful functionality as quickly as possible - dropping as many features as possible along the way to make it quicker - then to fill out functionality from there. For example, event groups are useful, but most people can get by without them, so they were dropped to free up time for essential, unmissable features. Obviously they'll get added in the end, it's just a lower priority!

However, we hope to expand C2 rapidly. You can build similar simple "toy" games, and if you're creative you can use some hacks (like storing variables in object's positions!) to make some more complicated games right now, but it's hard work!

Some useful feedback would be the essential features that you're really struggling to get by without. I have private variables next on the agenda, since I presume it's incredibly limiting not having them.

Download

Forum threads will be posted to this forum for new releases. (I'm not linking to one here because it'll go out of date pretty quick!)

Demo

You can preview a really simple test of a HTML5 game made in the current build here. The .capx for it can be downloaded here. Note: you'll need a HTML5 compatible browser! The latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are compatible, but Internet Explorer 8 isn't. However, it also works in Internet Explorer 9 which actually has the best canvas support right now!

Documentation & Known Issues

A list of known issues can be found here - please don't report these as bugs, we know about them already. There is not currently any documentation - there are help links in the program, but there hasn't been any documentation written for them to link to. We'll set up a wiki at some point for the links to point to.

Feedback & bug reports

The whole point of this preview is to get feedback, so please let us know what you think! Whether you especially like something or especially dislike something, do let us know - both positive and negative feedback is valuable. Feel free to post threads in this forum with your thoughts, suggestions, ideas or anything else you want to say.

Developers

You can extend Construct 2 with Javascript! Find out more here.

Get involved

Even if you're not a developer, there's still loads you can do to help out with the project! We'll be posting some ideas for the community to get involved with Construct 2's development shortly.

Thanks!

Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy trying out Construct 2, as limited as it may be! I'd also like to say thanks to Mary Jane who's done the new logo and our front-page C2 splashes, and Davo who's done a few bits and pieces and came up with the new design for the event sheet editor. Also, the HTML5 logo is the sort-of-official one from W3.

Absolutely awesome!

Testing in 3... 2... 1...

Second tester

Well, this was unexpected! Though the reasoning is sound given the goal, as I understand it, is cross-platform capabilities while keeping the bar of entry as low as can be well wrangled.

At any rate, I will go ahead and be "that guy" to ask the first inane and/or likely not in quite the most appropriate topic question---though I suppose this is a given being that this wound up being my first post here after stalking the place for awhile now:

Given the heavy Javascript slant, and wanting to stay on or ahead of the curve of things to come, might it be a rather good idea to delve into making pointed, ample use of CoffeeScript going forward? After reading the newfound goals of C2 it jumped out at me pretty quickly that they seem well aligned indeed.

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/?section=top

Really like the new UI, workflow should be nicer in this.

I wonder if in the in future you'll be able to add new .pngs into the textures folder, and they'll automatically become sprites?

I was finishing a simple "dodge the enemies" game, but C2 crashed...

Gonna try it again tomorrow!

Partial file saves for collaboration has my mouth watering... niiiiiice.

Strange though, I can't seem to get a sprite into the layout. I'm crossing my fingers that the image editor won't be stripped down when the final comes out someday.

Cool! I'll look at it as per a (semi)-long-time-customer obligation.

One thing stuck out though; the whole pay what you want thing. I really hope game designers are more grateful than gamers. If that indie game bundle says anything, it's that people can be dicks when it comes to supporting things they love, myself included.

Is it just me or is the demo slow? I shot and with 120+ objects the framerate went down to some 20 frames... It would be a nightmare if unaccelerated browser games is the only way to do games

What browser are you using? Chrome and IE9 are very fast, the others are still playing catch up (but I think they've all announced plans to hardware-accelerate their canvases).

Okay, I knew you guys were gonna use OpenGL, but HTML5 and a modular export system?! All these new features and improvements are fantastic, despite C2 being basically primitive right now. I can't wait for more!

A quick question: is it possible to set it up so that when you choose Run Layout, it opens the layout in Firefox or Chrome, as opposed to IE?

I'll reserve my opinions until I have a better grasp of things, but I do like how the sprite editor is now MSPaint (since all my sprites were Paint-made anyway). Though I wouldn't know how to do collision masks now!

A quick question: is it possible to set it up so that when you choose Run Layout, it opens the layout in Firefox or Chrome, as opposed to IE?

It's basically based on your default browser, I believe, which in this case is Chrome for me.

So you can choose what to pay for huh. That's...kind of weird. Does this mean people can charge for plugins?

Also, it seems Construct 2 has the folder options. It would awesome if you guys can at least port it to Construct 1.

HTML5 support...I can see YoYo games and stencyl sweating