Why Construct 3?

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bellborn

  • The conversation is 'Why Construct 3' hence the tittle.

    The authoritarian approach has its positive sides, but ...

    I dont see any notable addon creator, who confirmed that he will write for C3. So ... good conversation

  • People who want to do something more serious than single-day games, look at the engine's capabilities and the policies of its authors, shake their heads

    What policies specifically?

    The authoritarian approach has its positive sides

    Don't mistake directness for authoritarianism. I really don't see how anyone can say any one on the team is authoritarian.

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  • I do appreciate C3 over C2. I do not have much time for game development because I can only do it in my very limited free time.

    Nevertheless login on any computer let me use C3. Wherever I have time, I can use C3 as long as the computer has an internet connection.

    A few weeks ago I showed C3 to two young men in Botswana. Both where unemployed and desperatelly looking for a job. One is a graphic designer, the other a sound engineer. Despite the very poor internet, I could show them C3. As an example demo I created a simple breakout game from one of the C2 books I own. Once they grasped the way C3 works, they saw a lot of possibilities.

    We discussed if it would be possible to create interactive ebooks with C3. Or a kind of living books.

    I should spend more time with C3 and learn the tool inside out. We can do more with it than we think. It would not surprise me that in a few years from now, we can use C3 for more than gaming alone. I believe it will be possible to create sofisticated demos to make processes more clear or teach in an interactive way how something is done.

    I strongly believe in the future of C3. There is much to say about the subscription model. You can agree or disagree with me, however that subscription model secure the future of C3. A lifetime license is very nice for the enduser, however for the developer resources drain out fast.

    Now for C3, its future is wide open and the sun shines bright on it. Lets be creative and make our ideas come true! Keep up the good work, Scirra team!

    Chris

  • What policies specifically?

    The fate of the СС makes the position of developers on C2 unstable. Doing something big, people want to be confident in the future.

    If you look at construct3.ideas.aha.io, the future looks great. But when to wait for the arrival of this future, сonsidering two runtime?

    And what about Rex's plug-ins, for example, the Board series - two dozen add-ons for 2.5D? Everything says that their queue will never come for new runtime C3. So what's the point then in C3, if all this is on C2?

    Maybe in a year or two "Why Construct 3" will be a good topic, let's see.

  • Why do we have to wait for the future of C3? The future is now. Remaining with C2 is living in the past, a past which is already fading away. Despite the fact I also liked C2 very much and it is still on this laptop, I keep myself from using it.

    C3 is the future and the only way to go. Do you really want the Scirra team dividing their resources between C2 and C3? I think their time is better spent on C3 because in that way they can give us new features much quicker and can concentrate to make many improvements.

    Rex Rainbow made a lot of very usefull plugins for C2. Many people used them and he did a great job. When my understanding is correct, Rex Rainbow decided a time ago not to port his plugins to C3. I regret his decision very much but have to respect that. However, are we gonna put the future of C3 on the decision of one man? That is not a good idea in my opinion.

    Also with C3, everybody of us can write his/her own plugin in JavaScript when necessary. I am sure other people will fill the places of those who left.

    I see a very good and stable future for C3. One of my wishes is that in the future, we can use Construct also for developing administrational programs, the same way as now developing a game. When I first came accross Construct 2, I found it a revolutionairy method. To be honest, I was worried about the lifetime license because one time in the future it limits the revenue for the developers. I want the tools I use to have a stable future. Lifetime licenses are just the other way around. And when you do not agree with me about lifetime licenses, let me give you one question ;

    When you create a popular program which took you years to develop and once you release it you know you have to maintain it for years. You have many users which start to ask new features. In the first years you get a lot of new users, however your sales start to degrade. You know you have to support your family but also your development team. You desperate need resources to support new developments and has to keep up with the competition. Still your revenue is degrading because everybody is using your lifetime license. Your users are very happy because they ask you and they receive what they want for free. However there comes a time your revenue will sink to such low limits, it is no longer worthwhile to sustain your wonderfull application. On that moment your application dies.

    Now my question : how many of you offer lifetime licenses for the applications you develop? How many of you are working for free for your boss or your customers? I am sure this conclude the discussion about the subscription model.

    There is indeed room for improvement in C3 and to be honest that need will remain for the future too. C3 is an excellent tool with very good customer support coming from the Scirra team and the community. We all have something unique here, both in development but also a friendly way of helping each other. There are a lot of tutorials which teach us how to use this remarkable tool.

    Instead of keeping with C2 and threads like this one, why are we not combining our efforts to make constructive threads which helps us all?

    For new or prospective users, reading threads like these, I advise you to try out the free C3 version. It is very limited, however you will get the chance to make your own conclusions. I saw threads like these showing up too much in the past and their only intent is push a personal frustration or disagreement onto the community. I rarely find them constructive.

    Make some efforts, learn, fall and standup and above all believe in your idea. That is what development is all about because when it was easy, many more people would do it.

    For your information, I am not connected with Scirra in any way but I am very good with bookkeeping. What you read in this reply is my personal opinion.

    Chris

  • Rex Rainbow made a lot of very usefull plugins for C2. Many people used them and he did a great job. When my understanding is correct, Rex Rainbow decided a time ago not to port his plugins to C3. I regret his decision very much but have to respect that. However, are we gonna put the future of C3 on the decision of one man? That is not a good idea in my opinion.

    The problem is, Construct still has some deficiencies, and the community does pretty much need to make plugins to bring it up to the capabilities of other game engines in some respects - so if one of the most prolific and reliable developers of these plugins doesn't support it, then it's a big deal. I haven't checked C3 for a while, but when it dropped I was a bit disappointed, and since I'm several years into a C2 project I probably couldn't switch even if I wanted to. There are so many simple plugins that should come as part of the standard package - things like the canvas, move to, music fade, image/perspective distortion etc. The perceived mentality of Scirra seems to be that the community will make all that stuff, but I would be more confident if the base package had more of these quality of life improvements built in, so that we had proper ongoing support from the actual developers. Like I said, I haven't checked out C3 for a while, but last time I checked it still seemed to be missing many things that I would have thought obvious as high priority for people building a game engine that is meant to make things easier.I absolutely hate relying on plugins from sporadic developers, who use a forum like this full of dead links to post their work so I wish Scirra would take more responsibility for useful core behaviours and plugins in this respect as the community files are decentralised and an absolute mess. Community plugins are great, and I love the idea of them, but they should be used to enhance an already great product, not fix it up with sticky tape and glue.

  • My 2c, just to add to the discussion is this.

    Why construct: Scirra knows it's tech, the visual editor is first class, no other visual programming toolkit out there compares, for development(non-educational purposes). It's amazing, or ridiculous, the amount of out-of-the-box functionality that you get with Construct. And the performance is pretty decent and getting better. Seriously, i've benchmarked game projects made and tested in multiple engines in the past, and construct was one of the great winners in the html5 arena.(not sharing them, don't ask)

    The one thing that construct has against it, that i think scirra doesn't see, and it really is it's Achilles heel, is the asset management pipeline.

    People will use other engines/frameworks(phaser, cocos, panda, etc) because there they want to control when things are downloaded, how they are processed, and in which way they are presented.

    It would be great if construct had something like Unity's Asset Bundles, or at least some way to defer downloading assets til later. As other devs have suggested, some pros want the ability to control what goes into each generated sprite atlas, for instance, and other more personalized controls over how assets are processed. And some other individuals would also like to transform these assets at edit time and runtime.(I think this is coming recently?)

    These are changes that I'm sure the new runtime can accommodate and that are a lot simpler to implement that all the features Scirra has been implementing that relate to performance.

    I hope they take that into consideration and make the engine more pro-friendly. A lot of people wanna use Construct but they need the right functionality for bigger games, and certain audiences.

  • Hi Kios,

    You made very good suggestions. Did you suggest them also to Scirra? If not, you should share your suggestions soon with them.

    I do not know if the Scirra team will do something with the suggestions here. They have another dedicated channel (I think Github) to make feature requests and suggestions.

    Keep up the good work!

  • However, are we gonna put the future of C3 on the decision of one man? That is not a good idea in my opinion.

    I would be more confident if the base package had more of these quality of life improvements built in, so that we had proper ongoing support from the actual developers.

    In my many years as a TD who has used (and coded) for a myriad of different post-production DCCs (e.g. AE, Maya, LW, Nuke, etc), I've arrived at the opinion that regardless of how good or bad the base product is, the 3rd-party developers have always been a cornerstone of any real-world/professional situation.

    The host app devs can't provide all the tools that their user base are using, and determining what are essential features are ultimately confusing; many are essential features, and only few are not. These features may just be small 'quality of life' features, or a 'I didn't know you could do this in this app!' kind of feature. The tools themselves are not point; it's the fact that you can't possibly expect the host app dev to come with that at the rate you're experiencing.

    But I think the expectation -- explicit and implicit -- that *some* 3rd-party devs will inevitably fall by the wayside mis-judges their contribution to the product: there is the intangible value of their responsiveness of knowing what is needed in the real-world and implementing a solution. Users often talk about 3rd-party as 'tools' or 'plugins. It's not just about the plugins but the 3rd-party devs ongoing involvement that makes a difference. You won't get that level of nitty-gritty involvement from Scirra; you can't get that from any developer. (You can, however, wait in line until the feature you're pining for happens to get added.)

    This is the reason why I saw Rex's leaving, whose reason was strictly due to the SDK, was really a pity.

    The one thing that construct has against it, that i think scirra doesn't see, and it really is it's Achilles heel, is the asset management pipeline.

    It's hard to hold one's breath on that one. After a few years in the forums, simply observing the kind of the features and improvements that have been implemented, then the C3 reveal, it's pretty clear to me that 'management' or 'pipeline' is just simply not quite the gripping concept in the Construct world as it is in other worlds. I think they'd have to bring in someone who has some serious experience in larger projects, using another app, in order to understand.

    (E.g. I wrote a Sprite Manager for C2 -- a Python app -- for personal use to deal with a massive amount of animation sprites. I figured that I couldn't wait, and that there is no guarantee that any improvements in asset management will be relevant to me.)

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