Concerns from a "Serious" developer

Obviously there will be bugs on the first days of release. The whole point of a beta is for bugs like this to surface and be dealt with.

Oh really?

Well if that is the case C2 should be bug free after 5 years right?

Visited the C2 bug section lately?

> Obviously there will be bugs on the first days of release. The whole point of a beta is for bugs like this to surface and be dealt with.

>

Oh really?

Well if that is the case C2 should be bug free after 5 years right?

Visited the C2 bug section lately?

Ha!

Most of those would be called "features" in Construct Classic.

> Obviously there will be bugs on the first days of release. The whole point of a beta is for bugs like this to surface and be dealt with.

>

Oh really?

Well if that is the case C2 should be bug free after 5 years right?

Visited the C2 bug section lately?

Didn't you finally want to leave the good people here alone?

Tom we really need a Block function in the new forums.

Didn't you finally want to leave the good people here alone?

Tom we really need a Block function in the new forums.

But how would a block function work?

Does the owner of a thread have the ability to block someone from posting in their thread?

Does it just hide the other users' posts from you? Or have a button to see it when you want to know what they said?

Does it stop them from being able to reply to you / quote you / tag you?

Being able to choose what information to see or ignore is yet another reason why arguments start, I don't think it would make things better.

However, for hateful posts you can surely report them.

Whatever I, and other developers here, may have said about Construct. It doesn't mean that Scirra's team isn't working hard, just maybe not towards the outcome that we would like (again, I'd like for Scirra to take a stance on that moving forward with C3) and the mods are also great at responding quickly.

Construct has a great community, these arguments are growing pains as Construct morphs into its next evolution. Right now, to me, it's looking like it's going more the way of "Scratch" with hobbyists and web and educators having the best time with it, and some mobile/"light console" as optional bonus features.

If Scirra advertised the tool that way, I would never have a problem with it, although I would see partially missed potential for console export from Construct's awesome editor, that's just personal opinion.

At the same time, threads like these serve as a "canary in the coal mine" for other developers, so they know when it's time to move on from their prototypes and free games to other engines if they seek commercial and console content (or to let them know if they even have to change engines at all, which currently the consensus from showcased and other "serious" devs seems to be: yes)

FYI - This forum does have a Block function. If you go into your User Control Panel, you'll see a section called Friends & Foes.

Just add someone's name to the Foes list and their posts will disappear. You can still see that they posted though (with a link to click if you want to view it). I vaguely remember reading somewhere that they have plans to implement a similar function on the new forum as well.

However, I do agree with — I'm not sure that it would make things better, especially with a "certain person" that gets bent out of shape when you ignore him. But, then again, it could possibly expedite the process for those that are clearly on a path of self-destruction.

So- has anyone started a thread to find out if anyone actually wants a C3 Chrome browser based engine?

Some of the people on this thread have claimed most people want that but I am sure not seeing it.

I guess Tom and Ashley could tell us what the unique download or use numbers have been for C3 and that would give us at least an idea of how many people tried the beta?

I would be interested in seeing that number?

Like how many tried it the first day and how many new people are trying it each day?

Of course that isn't going to tell us how many people will buy C3 and lots of people will try anything that is free and considering this is a subscription product it will probably not be something people buy to try.

Having worked with UDK and previously Unreal 3 in the past I thought i'd weigh in on this.

At it's height, Epic had around 10 programmers working full time on the engine for each stable release and 2 Scripters working on the front end code not to mention the entire team that worked on Kismet function (the visual scripting part).

Scirra has Ashley and —

My point being; the amount of time it takes to write new features vs the rate they're expected by the user base is vastly disproportionate.

Either we have a stable engine that exports to a fair few platforms or we have a largely broken engine that has a lot of features (see the early days of Unity engine or the first few months of Unreal 4).

There's always going to be limitations to what Construct can do and the guys are simply moving the engine in a direction that will allow Scirra to keep growing as a business and better develop the product we're all paying for.

With only a couple of people working on the backend nobody can seriously expect everything in this thread to be addressed immediately and in the lifetime of C2 we've had a whole lot of new features and things the community has asked for, but everything takes time.

Personally I don't like the idea of a browser based system, but that's just it, I don't like the idea of it. Nobody can judge C3 yet and I wouldn't expect it to be in a state where anyone can judge or berate it for at least the next 12 months.

Scirra has Ashley and —

I *think* they have more now?

Having worked with UDK and previously Unreal 3 in the past I thought i'd weigh in on this.

At it's height, Epic had around 10 programmers working full time on the engine for each stable release and 2 Scripters working on the front end code not to mention the entire team that worked on Kismet function (the visual scripting part).

Scirra has Ashley and —

My point being; the amount of time it takes to write new features vs the rate they're expected by the user base is vastly disproportionate.

Either we have a stable engine that exports to a fair few platforms or we have a largely broken engine that has a lot of features (see the early days of Unity engine or the first few months of Unreal 4).

There's always going to be limitations to what Construct can do and the guys are simply moving the engine in a direction that will allow Scirra to keep growing as a business and better develop the product we're all paying for.

With only a couple of people working on the backend nobody can seriously expect everything in this thread to be addressed immediately and in the lifetime of C2 we've had a whole lot of new features and things the community has asked for, but everything takes time.

Personally I don't like the idea of a browser based system, but that's just it, I don't like the idea of it. Nobody can judge C3 yet and I wouldn't expect it to be in a state where anyone can judge or berate it for at least the next 12 months.

So are you willing to wait 5 years for C3 to work fairly well like C2 that still has many bugs and exporters that don't work properly?

Keep in mind many of those features, workarounds and plugins we use in our C2 games were actually created by outsiders not Scirra and those will not work in C3 with out a rewrite and many of those designers have moved on to other engines.

I don't see many of the C2 plugin designers jumping for joy for C3 and wanting to design for that engine.

What is to say Scirrra won't decide to abandon C3 for their next big idea in a few years?

Many people outside of Scirra put time and effort into making C2 workable now feel abandoned by Scirra. Not a good business practice in my opinion.

> I would say that getting this community more involved would be a great start. Conducting direct polls and really having a way for supporters to give feedback.

>

This has worked against us in the past. The multiplayer feature was massively voted for, but from the data we look at, very few people actually use it. So the hype effect is a big distorting factor in polls. I don't regret it, it was a super interesting project to work on, but it's something to bear in mind, and is the main reason I have avoided polls since then.

Having said that, we do have a feature-voting system planned anyway but I am going to strongly caveat it with warnings that "votes are not a guarantee of implementation", for exactly the reason we had with multiplayer. Also I can easily imagine things like 3D becoming #1 voted features, and there are a wide range of reasons why we're holding off on that.

Glad to see that there is a feature voting system planned. Could one possible solution be to have users submit requests, but these be collated and curated by Scirra who then select several which are in line with your objectives with C3 and then the community votes on those? That way you still have control, but we have a good idea of what's coming and are still influencing the direction of the product to a degree. Just an idea anyway, I understand opening it up to everybody would be chaos, but I think that some sort of dialogue between Scirra and its customers on features is still important.

>

> > I would say that getting this community more involved would be a great start. Conducting direct polls and really having a way for supporters to give feedback.

> >

> This has worked against us in the past. The multiplayer feature was massively voted for, but from the data we look at, very few people actually use it. So the hype effect is a big distorting factor in polls. I don't regret it, it was a super interesting project to work on, but it's something to bear in mind, and is the main reason I have avoided polls since then.

>

> Having said that, we do have a feature-voting system planned anyway but I am going to strongly caveat it with warnings that "votes are not a guarantee of implementation", for exactly the reason we had with multiplayer. Also I can easily imagine things like 3D becoming #1 voted features, and there are a wide range of reasons why we're holding off on that.

>

Glad to see that there is a feature voting system planned. Could one possible solution be to have users submit requests, but these be collated and curated by Scirra who then select several which are in line with your objectives with C3 and then the community votes on those? That way you still have control, but we have a good idea of what's coming and are still influencing the direction of the product to a degree. Just an idea anyway, I understand opening it up to everybody would be chaos, but I think that some sort of dialogue between Scirra and its customers on features is still important.

Would you buy a car because the car salesman says they will listen to you and maybe fix things you find wrong with it or put in features you want later?

Just sayin'

I guess Tom and Ashley could tell us what the unique download or use numbers have been for C3 and that would give us at least an idea of how many people tried the beta?

I would be interested in seeing that number?

Like how many tried it the first day and how many new people are trying it each day?

Here's some numbers for you:

https://twitter.com/ConstructTeam/statu ... 2038028289

Also Lamar, if you feel we've disrespected you - feel free to leave like you have suggested. No one is stopping you. At this point we'd rather be spending more time working on the software than answering the never-ending spool of questions you've been throwing at us for the last several weeks.

> I guess Tom and Ashley could tell us what the unique download or use numbers have been for C3 and that would give us at least an idea of how many people tried the beta?

>

> I would be interested in seeing that number?

>

> Like how many tried it the first day and how many new people are trying it each day?

>

Here's some numbers for you:

https://twitter.com/ConstructTeam/statu ... 2038028289

10,000 pretty good!

Now how many of those were unique users because I opened C3 at least 10 times that first day trying to get things to work?

How many of those people are still using C3 now after a week?

8,000 unique people tried it in the first 24 hours.

[quote:2m609svv]Now how many of those were unique users because I opened C3 at least 10 times that first day trying to get things to work?

Your questions are posed in an aggravating way.