Construct 3 any news?

I agree plus (again i'm no expert) but wouldn't that mean we couldn't use all the shiny WebGL effects and stuff anymore? I think it's not a problem of HTML5 but of sometimes faulty wrappers as far as i can tell although i heard it's much better now than it was even a year ago.

If anyone's interested: i signed up for the GMS2 beta just to try it out. I used GMS back a few years ago but never came very far with it. The Interface sure looks different but honestly i don't really like it and i tried to look at it as objectively as possible. The drag and drop system might be a nice idea but it's really just a visual representation of GML code. It's NOT like the event system of C2, which is basically it's own thing when it comes to logic. I followed the beginners tutorial on YouTube but stopped when it came to the point where you have to write multiple lines of confusing stuff just to keep the Score Display in the upper half of the screen from scrolling with the game. In C2, just set the layer Parallax to the desired number and done. Plus you don't have any form of behaviours available so every engine be it for Jump N Runs, Top Down, etc. has to be completely written from scratch.

So even with the new version of DnD in GMS2, making Games in C2 is still so much faster and more enjoyable. After pages of criticism and comparing to the supposed "green lands" of other engines and calling them superior, i just thought it'd be important to say this and i don't want the Scirra Team getting too depressed when reading through this Thread

About the release of C3: C2 is perfectly functional and a great piece of software. It's codebase is also a lot younger than that of Fusion 2.5 (which dates back to at least the Multimedia Fusion Days of the Mid to late 90s) or Game Maker Studio (which basically was a reskinning of the original Game Maker, also released in the mid 90s) so it makes complete sense, that C3 isn't coming out yet but it's really great that it's already being worked on (after all, it's a total rewrite of the Editor, something that takes others decades to tackle, just sayin' )

So if i actually could give a wishlist for the new Editor it'd be the same usability and hopefully some shiny new features that make life even easier and a handful of new plugins and behaviours

But it's just my two cents

Ashley

Is there a chance for webassambly in C3?

Please don't waste time to native export or 3D. What we really need is "Third-party extensibility of the editor" and "Project modularity features".

People don't understand that when they have a 3D option, the engine won't going to make a 3D game itself. 3D is complicated. I think 90% of people who want 3D in C3 are not going to make any games with it. We don't even have a decent game in 2D but we want 3D. And with "Third-party extensibility of the editor" someone can make a plugin like Q3D with 3D editor and it would be close to official 3D support. You can check Q3Ds forum page and see how complicated it is.

Native export doesn't mean your object/effect/particle heavy games perform well on any platform. You still need to think about performance and adjust your game. And I don't think people going to buy native export modules. Check GMS2 module prices, it costs a lot.

People say other engines have HTML5 export, too. Yes, they have but they are really bad.

BTW I really like the GM2 look and I got the beta but If I'm going to use GMS2 I would prefer GML. It seems simpler than DnD. Their DnD system is still bad compared to C2's event system.

...Native export doesn't mean your object/effect/particle heavy games perform well on any platform. You still need to think about performance and adjust your game And I don't think people going to buy native export modules. Check GMS2 module prices, it costs a lot...

I don't need to have native export, but I would dearly love to see scirra maintain a core suite of plugins for a publishing pipeline to Mobile. I'm happy to use Intel XDK or Cocoon.io to compile, but I hate having to rely on 3rd party plugins that have no support for fundamental things like ads, Play Store / App Store integration, analytics. I think Scirra should provide plugins for those functions as part of their core C3 offering, given that mobile is a really important target platform for C2 devs trying to generate income. If keeping those plugins up-to-date meant the box price for C3 was higher, I'd gladly pay for it!

saiyadjin Maybe you are right, but "thanks" to the wrappers, usually the performance is not as good.

— I've also tested the beta... The interface is nice, but for some reason I feel that a FullHD monitor is not enough for me. As for the DnD, is the same one, just adapted a little to the new design.

Construct's interface and events are more intuitive and user friendly.

bilgekaan "Third-party extensibility of the editor" and "Project modularity features". +1

But I am of the ones that would like to see basic 3D support: possibility to import simple 3D models and animations (games like Sonic for DS or Sonic 4 where the character is 3D and the world 2D) or simple shapes like 3D boxes (to create 2.5D or isometric games).

As for GMS2 prices, you still have GMS1 Free version that you can make games.

You think that GMS2 modules cost much ? Then you haven't heard about Cocoon.io 500$ to remove "build with Cocoon" splash for 1 game . Or think about the costs of releasing games for iOS (100$/year developer subscription + costs of a Mac and an iOS device). Or other programs like Stencyl or Game Salad with 100~200$/year subscription. If you are a serious developer you will use these exporters and will get your investment back.

On this note, Construct 2's one-time 100 Euro price is decent enough.

I'm not against HTML5-only... I actually like the idea that you code your game once and plays the same on all devices, but the reality is that there are still issues like the never-ending NW.js (screen flickering, Steam Overlay and the newest one with recording software), the difference in browsers (the iOS sound issue), the mobile wrappers ... where Ashley says that he has no imput over them (wait and see, maybe they will be fixed in the future )

tgeorgemihai - true, and that is mostly because they're badly optimized. but lately they do improve, and things are going better if not from the source code side, at least from the hardware side

My stance on native engines is detailed here: https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/28/the-case-against-native-engines

I think "make native engines" is everyone's knee-jerk reaction when something doesn't work. For example, sure, we could make changes to make publishing easier. But that can be done anyway. You don't need native code to solve that. I also have direct experience of working with a native engine for Construct Classic. That had enough problems to make me move away from it. It is certainly not perfect. Do not imagine it will magically fix everything!

tgeorgemihai Compared to C2's price GMS2 (HTML5 module itself more expensive than C2) modules are expensive. Personally, I can afford it but I don't think people realize that adding native export make C3's price higher and it would be waste of time.

gumshoe2029

I lives in Taiwan, not in Philippines. Ah, they are all in Southeast Asia.

Oops! My bad. :-p But you clearly love your family. :-p

My stance on native engines is detailed here: https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/28/the-case-against-native-engines

I think "make native engines" is everyone's knee-jerk reaction when something doesn't work. For example, sure, we could make changes to make publishing easier. But that can be done anyway. You don't need native code to solve that. I also have direct experience of working with a native engine for Construct Classic. That had enough problems to make me move away from it. It is certainly not perfect. Do not imagine it will magically fix everything!

The grass is always greener on the native-engine side.

Please don't waste time to native export or 3D. What we really need is "Third-party extensibility of the editor" and "Project modularity features".

You can kind of do this already with the export as a project save mode... but greater modularity is always welcome.

My stance on native engines is detailed here: https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/28/the-case-against-native-engines

I think "make native engines" is everyone's knee-jerk reaction when something doesn't work. For example, sure, we could make changes to make publishing easier. But that can be done anyway. You don't need native code to solve that. I also have direct experience of working with a native engine for Construct Classic. That had enough problems to make me move away from it. It is certainly not perfect. Do not imagine it will magically fix everything!

I have always believed that javascript is very slow and i believed that Native is the best solution but game design is also a huge factor (Actually the highest factor for me).

But I imagine in a perfect world considering that game design is in it's optimum condition that going Native is still better in theory. Until your blog post. You have mentioned about WebAssembly, by the name it's obvious to me that it is also a low-level programming language like Assembly and generally way faster and might even clear my doubts.

But also as you said, it is still in development.... Not to mention, it is also unstable. According to Google anyway...

My question is, would it still be helpful to C3 on it's current state? Waiting for it may take too long... or am i missing something?

The things that bother me most about c2 are small things, like not being able to set size of layers width and height separately, or not being able to rotate tilemaps with their collisions also, or things not having expressions for properties you can set elsewhere. Also shader support is lacking- you can't make shaders that use multiple textures for reading/writing data, for example.

Also, there could be a lot of area for improvement in ways of organizing your eventsheets/events to be more readable, like color-coding groups. Also tracking where undo/redos are made would be useful. A way to see where functions are being called- basically ways to help see the flow better so you can jump between eventsheets and not get lost.

Also, families could be improved- It is often annoying if you have a variable in one family and need it in another, and have to rename the first one and then add it in the other, then go into the eventsheet and change which events use the old variable to the new one.

Sprite animation system could be improved- spritesheets for example, tiled sprites, etc.

Also, would like to see more support for in-game menu systems, as that is a very important aspect of games that engines overlook.

Also it is annoying with the export problems, yes, but I believe that will improve.

Here we are again with the classic case of Native

VS

HTML5. Well I think you can say as much as you want for both, in the end they both come with their own set of limitations and issues. Over the period of 2-3 years that I've actively used and still use C2, I never really had problems with the web itself.

One of the few things I'd complain about is the way Scirra (I guess Ashley in particular since he handles the most of the stuff) deals with bugs. Don't get me wrong I fully understand that there are bugs not caused by C2, however I think re-directing the user to those 3rd party websites to report the bugs by themselves is not the right way to go.

Let me go a little further by giving an example on the "correct" way of handling bugs by 3rd parties from a well known competitor named Unity.

If you would for example use their native engine and experience a bug, you'd report it to the issue tracker and wait for their response.

Usually you get a quick response and a bugfix within the next few update cycles (just like C2 does), however if you'd experience a driver issue for example caused by buggy AMD drivers. They don't re-direct you to the AMD forums and say something like "It's not our fault, report it to them please." no, they take the information they got and report it there for you. This is the behaviour I'd like to see from Scirra, being more helpful in regards of fixing 3rd party bugs instead of blaming them and then keeping quiet about it.

Before people start with arguments like "Don't be lazy and just do it yourself!", indeed that is something that more advanced users can and will do, in fact I'm doing it sometimes as well but please try to see this situation from a beginners perspective. They already have it difficult enough to learn C2 and now you expect them to go ahead and report a complex bug with next to no knowledge about how a game engine works, I don't think that's right.

I understand that there currently might be no time for Ashley to do the things I've mentioned but as soon as the work on C3 is done, I'd really like to see some improvements.

In the end it counts as some sort of customer support right or am I wrong?

This is also a response for THIS topic which had a discussion about the same issues that I tried to explain above.

As always share your thoughts below and keep calm, it's alright to criticise the things you like.

Just dropping my thoughts here on some recent topics:

• Forget native. It has been discussed like a million times and Ashley even took the effort to write a detailed blog post about HTML5 vs native performance.

• C2 has a great price and I still love the way they do licensing. Imagine that I have no internet access, but I want to activate my C2 license on my computer. I can do it easily. I could even develop in a cave (provided it has electricity).

• If Scirra decides to raise the price with C3, I'd also pay it gladly. I just hope they don't plan on subscription model. I'd rather buy the engine for life, even if it's more expensive. Well.. they can do both the same time too. I'm just thinking out loud.

• GMS2 looks promising but none of the new features got me really after watching the videos (except the new image editor, how they made the fire effect with it). Node-based visual coding will always lead to a mess in bigger projects and I'm yet to see a better implementation of it than UE4 Blueprints.

• I'm excited about C3 just like most of you are here. I hope that we'll get something soon, but in the meantime I'm curious about what Fusion 3 will bring into the ring. Also, I think Scirra plays it's cards very well by waiting out.

• I agree with what

  TheRealDannyyy wrote about handling 3rd party bugs. I understand if Scirra has no manpower to do this now (but don't forget that they did do it regarding some bugs), but it would be a welcomed change in the future.

My stance on native engines is detailed here: https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/28/the-case-against-native-engines

I think "make native engines" is everyone's knee-jerk reaction when something doesn't work. For example, sure, we could make changes to make publishing easier. But that can be done anyway. You don't need native code to solve that. I also have direct experience of working with a native engine for Construct Classic. That had enough problems to make me move away from it. It is certainly not perfect. Do not imagine it will magically fix everything!

That article was a strong influence on deciding on Construct as my preferred tool over other software.