A question for experienced developers in C2/C3...

Hello guys I recently have changed from GameMaker 2 to C3 but i still have some questions to ask about the engine:

1.- Can you make in C3 games 2.5 D games for Pc?

2.-Is the C3 engine capable to run beautiful 2d games like rayman,child of light,Deponia kind of games for pc?

I'm a little bit lost in this so any help will be great thanks!

1 - Only with 3rd party addons. C3 is a 2D engine and while you can achieve isometric games and such, you'll have to rely on 2D images only without 3D models.

2 - It is able to run games like that, but those games had very serious optimization techniques to keep the game running at a high framerate. You might want to read about that before starting a game like those. If you do start a similar game, make sure to test often on slower devices too (don't leave testing to the final stages of your project).

1 - Only with 3rd party addons. C3 is a 2D engine and while you can achieve isometric games and such, you'll have to rely on 2D images only without 3D models.

2 - It is able to run games like that, but those games had very serious optimization techniques to keep the game running at a high framerate. You might want to read about that before starting a game like those. If you do start a similar game, make sure to test often on slower devices too (don't leave testing to the final stages of your project).

Thanks glerikud for your fast answer i will take this in mind for my project. I have another question if you don't mind to answer it : Do you think C3 engine is as powerful as GameMaker 2 engine?

Thanks again for your answers.

Do you think C3 engine is as powerful as GameMaker 2 engine?

I've been using Gamemaker Studio 2 a lot the past couple of weeks so I thought I'd jump in and offer my own perspective on this.

For html5 games... Maybe? Probably? I wouldn't be surprised if it was, seeing as Scirra have been building C2 and C3 around web technology from the get-go.

But if you don't give a monkey's about web and only want to deploy to desktop then no. From my impression C2/C3 doesn't come close to Gamemaker Studio in terms of runtime performance.

If you're more interested in what you can do with the two tools I'd say C2/3 is flexible enough to do pretty much whatever kind of game you want, as long as it's 2D. Gamemaker is better at accommodating people who want to make pixel art games, while Construct has a more pleasant way of scripting game code, namely the events system. But the step-down in difficulty from gml scripting to C2/3 events is pretty marginal imo.

One thing I really like about Construct over Gamemaker is how you can set up collision masks for sprite frames using polygons. Construct can guess the general shape of each sprite frame, then make a polygonal shape for it that you can tweak easily afterwards. Getting Gamemaker collision masks properly set up is a bit of a pain in comparison.

> Do you think C3 engine is as powerful as GameMaker 2 engine?

>

I've been using Gamemaker Studio 2 a lot the past couple of weeks so I thought I'd jump in and offer my own perspective on this.

For html5 games... Maybe? Probably? I wouldn't be surprised if it was, seeing as Scirra have been building C2 and C3 around web technology from the get-go.

But if you don't give a monkey's about web and only want to deploy to desktop then no. From my impression C2/C3 doesn't come close to Gamemaker Studio in terms of runtime performance.

If you're more interested in what you can do with the two tools I'd say C2/3 is flexible enough to do pretty much whatever kind of game you want, as long as it's 2D. Gamemaker is better at accommodating people who want to make pixel art games, while Construct has a more pleasant way of scripting game code, namely the events system. But the step-down in difficulty from gml scripting to C2/3 events is pretty marginal imo.

One thing I really like about Construct over Gamemaker is how you can set up collision masks for sprite frames using polygons. Construct can guess the general shape of each sprite frame, then make a polygonal shape for it that you can tweak easily afterwards. Getting Gamemaker collision masks properly set up is a bit of a pain in comparison.

Thanks for your reply ErekT.

For my experience was the same.I was using GM2 for 2 months and I found the collision not very intuitive, so I tried C3 and I found almost everything fast and easy.The thing is I see people here doing mostly html5 games and I wasn't sure if C2/C3 can handle that as good as GM2.But something still not clear to me it's if C3 is a more powerful engine than C2 and if it reaches more or less GM2 engine. ¿What do you think?

But something still not clear to me it's if C3 is a more powerful engine than C2 and if it reaches more or less GM2 engine. ¿What do you think?

C3 uses the same runtime as C2, only with a new editor that runs in the browser. Scirra stated that they'll rewrite the whole runtime for C3, but that could take years.

From my impression C2/C3 doesn't come close to Gamemaker Studio in terms of runtime performance.

I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks with actual measurements on this. We've seen benchmarks comparing C2 in Chrome to other native engines, and it could equal or exceed some other native engines on the market, but GMS wasn't tested. Modern JS engines can compile to extremely well optimised machine code.

Ashley

I haven't set up performance benchmarks before. If you could link me to a good benchmark capx, I'd be happy to try and recreate those conditions in GMS to see how they compare.

And just to be clear, this wasn't meant as a stab against Construct or to fire up the whole native debate again or anything Just personal impressions from seeing how my half-ported game performs in GMS on weak computers compared to C2 and nwjs.

Ashley

I haven't set up performance benchmarks before. If you could link me to a good benchmark capx, I'd be happy to try and recreate those conditions in GMS to see how they compare.

I think these were the performance tests discussed in this thread. I remember that Godot was roughly equivalent to slightly worse than the c2 exports and that Unity was a clear performance winner in every respect.

I would be very interested if you could put together a GMS/C2 bunnymark comparison!

Oddly enough, all my games involve puking out a bunch of bunnies.

Games similar to Child of Light and Rayman Legends are definitely possible, those games rely heavily on artwork, you just need to be a bit smart about it. In terms of graphical fidelity I'm doing a game with similar results. You have to rely on third party applications and plugins to get up to the same level, but you will get there eventually.

I use Construct 2 with spriter as animation tool and magicam for camera panning and transitions, then I use HTML5-effects such as basicBlur, somebody's effects "flag" and "skend" for foliage (together with built in sine-values for angle and size of the objects). I think the performance of Construct2 is great. You won't get to same performance levels as ubi-art but to be perfectly honest ubi-art is not really a 2D engine. It uses a lot of 3D technology which makes the game even more optimized.

If you target PC and consoles you have a lot of headroom. if you target mobile you need to be smart about layers and overdraws (you can have a lot of layers, but try to keep overdraws to a minimum) download rayman jungle run and you will probably get what I mean with a lot of parallax-layers, but never at the same screen, and hardly ever overdrawing.

I'm making this game, perhaps it is a good example that will showcase what you can do with construct.

Games similar to Child of Light and Rayman Legends are definitely possible, those games rely heavily on artwork, you just need to be a bit smart about it. In terms of graphical fidelity I'm doing a game with similar results. You have to rely on third party applications and plugins to get up to the same level, but you will get there eventually.

I use Construct 2 with brashmonkey.com/:7wxh8bh9]spriter[/url] as animation tool and magicam for camera panning and transitions, then I use HTML5-effects such as basicBlur,

Beautiful art work! it's good to know that this kind of beautiful games can be done in C2.

keep up the good work!

—:

That's a fine-looking game you got there so far <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

I would be very interested if you could put together a GMS/C2 bunnymark comparison!

Okay, here we go:

GMS2 - no render - 9500 objects - 55 fps

GMS2 - render - 9300 objects - 55 fps

C2 nwjs - no render - 12650 objects - 55 fps

C2 nwjs - render - 10900 objects - 55 fps

This is on an i5 2.67ghz processor, 8 gig ram, intel iris 6100, and windows 8.1. For the no renders I just turned off sprite visibility on both builds.

It seems like C2 outperforms GMS2 by quite a bit on this benchmark. Which makes me wonder why my own game performs significantly better in gms than construct. The game logic is structured about the same, and the gpu load should be more or less identical. Hmm...

Possible culprits: The platform behaviour bogs things down in my game. Or maybe the code refactoring helps performance out in the gms version (things were getting a bit unwieldy in the c2 version).

Anyways, pure speculation! On this benchmark at least, C2 comes out on top.

Here's the GMS2 builds:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/30yeiludx4ast ... d.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dy85n6qv7urkt ... w.zip?dl=0

And the project files if anyone wants to load them up in GMS2 themselves:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/aclujpdr5c27g ... h.rar?dl=0

I think you'll find that HTML5 just generally feels more "janky" than most native platforms, so although "in theory" / simple tests like this C2 might out-perform, it's just not a consistently smooth feeling even if the FPS number is the same.

The platform behaviour bogs things down in my game

+1 to this, I've seen that most people who don't run into major performance issues either use their own platforming behavior or are not making a 2D platformer

+1 to this, I've seen that most people who don't run into major performance issues either use their own platforming behavior or are not making a 2D platformer

Perhaps I'm jinxing myself, but I've never had a problem with it. I'm currently making a 1080p platformer and being real sloppy about graphics optimisation tbh, and it seems to lick along at 60fps like it ain't nothin'