Addon SDK v2

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Overboy

    Sir LoLz

    It is likely because the effects only work with webGL, but the project is set to webGPU instead.

    Try: In the project setting change the Advanced -> Enable WebGPU setting to 'No' and check again.

    If that was the problem, it is not a SDK V2 issue.

    I feel like the LTS versions address a lot of my concerns and are a good compromise, together with the ~1 year transition period to SDK v2 it should be enough time to reduce the damage to a minimum. 1 year is also a long time for Scirra to keep up their promise, if they take the time to add some of the addons officially

    the next release includes a 'Reset' action for event variables, so that it is no longer necessary to use an addon to do that.

    and add missing SDK features to fix others,

    Part of the project of the Addon SDK v2 is to increase the existing API surface to make sure it's more capable

    then I'm hopeful for a smooth transition.

    The only thing left that I feel is not addressed and where no compromise is found yet is that the addon devs will lose a lot of potential to deal with issues the community has, they lose a lot of access and power.

    I wish a compromise could be found for this too.

    I know Scirra wants to "increase the existing API surface", but that's obviously an ongoing process that is already happening for as long as C3 has an API. Which wasn't enough, and is the reason why addon devs had to use undocumented features in the first place.

    Just trying to lock them out doesn't seem like a great solution to me, especially when I already read that people seem to have a lock pick for it already.

    Maybe there is a way to still allow addon devs access to internals for them to tinker with, but they can't publish those addons for normal C3, instead it's a way for them to then ask Scirra to expose the needed functionality in SDK v2.

    This way the SDK could naturally grow in a way that is most useful to addon devs and at the same time reduces the load on Scirra because they don't have to just expose everything for SDK v2 to make it useful and addon devs wont have a reason to use the lock pick, because if that happens we are back to square one.

    What to do with spriter, pro ui, plugins from chadori? I use a lot of third-party plugins in my projects, and many of them are paid ones that I personally bought. Now scirra disables them. I have been paying for a subscription to construct for about 10 years. After reading the entire thread, I came across a message that there are hacked versions of construct 3, and for the first time in 10 years I came up with the idea to look for information about hacked versions of construct. This is just a mockery of users, the community has been asking for some functions for 5-10 years, and these requests are rejected (we have a small team, bo bo bo) but at the same time you have time to deal with the unnecessary SDK v2, you guys seem to have forgotten at whose expense the banquet is!!! I was just blown away by this news!!!

    What to do with spriter, pro ui, plugins from chadori? I use a lot of third-party plugins in my projects, and many of them are paid ones that I personally bought. Now scirra disables them. I have been paying for a subscription to construct for about 10 years. After reading the entire thread, I came across a message that there are hacked versions of construct 3, and for the first time in 10 years I came up with the idea to look for information about hacked versions of construct. This is just a mockery of users, the community has been asking for some functions for 5-10 years, and these requests are rejected (we have a small team, bo bo bo) but at the same time you have time to deal with the unnecessary SDK v2, you guys seem to have forgotten at whose expense the banquet is!!! I was just blown away by this news!!!

    In the Chadori Discord, he talks about updating to SDK v2 but says it will take him awhile and a ton of work. I also use his plugins, so I understand the fear but for the most part we should be good it seems.

    Hey Ashley, just a reminder that the problem is not that you will break ALL existing projects with third-party addons. The problem is that nothing shows that you will give the community the tools to fix them back. The past says you won't do it, but I'll try to be optimistic and cope that you'll finally make an industry standard API.

    And with "Industry standard" I don't mean encapsulation btw, I mean F-E-A-T-U-R-E-S.

    But nonetheless, if you insist of leaving addons to die without reason, I'm sure the community will just find a way to break through your encapsulation, I'm sure I will.

    I'm sure the community will just find a way to break through your encapsulation, I'm sure I will.

    Yep. And then unsupported or hacked addons will, of course, be removed from the website and banned on the forum, leading to a "black market" of addons and secret Discord groups. Fun times ahead!

    And just to think that instead of fighting these windmills, Ashley could spend the next year or two developing something useful, like improving the terribly outdated debugger or adding official UI plugins.

    Over the past 2-3 years they already :

    - spent 1+ year working on working on a new seperate product targeting a different audience : Construct Animate (back then Scirra said it would allow to expand their team so it would benefit us, which has yet to be seen...)

    - increased the subscription price for gamedev users even if less time was allocated to gamedev features as lot of time was allocated to Construct Animate instead

    - spent several months to work on a RTS game instead of improving the engine (EDIT: to answer Dop2000, you're right it was a personal project but it wasn't presented that way and it was Scirra allocating their "limited resources" on this instead of other stuff)

    - Then spent many months developing a opinionated Flowchart feature

    Sure those projects maybe allowed to add a few handy features useful for specific gamedev needs but who asked for it ? i'm pretty sure it would have been 100x better for anyone if they focused on community requests, you know the actual subscribers needs.

    Now we're here funding a massive regression in the expandability of the engine and the destruction of 6 years of collective work (actually 13+ years as there is also a bunch of working addons that were ported from C2 and that will also be impossible to port in SDK2). We know we'll have to stick to a frozen version forever to expand the engine meaningfully and still need to pay a yearly subscription just to open old projects on obsolete versions until they no longer work at all in a few years. Feels great paying a subscription. 👌

    I mean if you don't have time or don't care about community requests and feedbacks, then at least just let 3rd party devs do their stuff 🤷‍♀️

    official UI plugins

    This is a perfect example of the whole issue with Construct and community feedback. Everybody has been asking for in-editor UI features (like Unity or Godot) for years, and instead, they chose to spend about a year implementing a solution that requires CSS/HTML. This solution involves tedious workarounds and shenanigans, doesn’t allow any preview of what it would look like at edit-time, and has very limited synergies with other C3 features. HTML/CSS support is a cool feature, but who asked for it? Is C3 really a beginner-friendly engine if it requires using Eventsheets, JS, HTML, and CSS with an unintuitive workflow to make a simple game?

    Addon devs have been asking for years to expose existing hidden methods, that would allow to easily create 3rd party UI Solutions, in the Editor SDK (which is fully locked/obfuscated, making it totally impossible to create relevant stuff with it : exactly as the Runtime SDK is about to become with SDK2), and the answer is just "we prefer users to use HTML/CSS to create UI". So not only they don't want to create UI system themself, which could be understandable, but they also don't want to spend a few days providing the capabilities for anyone to do it themselves and share it with the community. Great example of collaborative effort with Addon devs !

    Overboy

    - spent several months to work on a RTS game instead of improving the engine

    This bit is unfair. We all have personal projects.

    "industry standard", "encapsulation", "desperate customers with ruined projects come and beg us for help"

    Each of those points were already heavily nuanced by everyone and for multiple reasons. So anyone can just read this thread and the previous one from 2 month ago to understand why it doesn't justify what is happening here

    But i just want to insist on this "desperate customers with ruined projects come and beg us for help", "happening often, happening right now"

    We all know how you're handling users facing bugs/black screens : copy pasting this same message :

    If you run in to a problem please file an issue following all the guidelines.

    If at least one of those extensive guidelines isn't respected, you just immediately close the issue without even invastigating. Which is fine, we understand you can't afford spending several hours each time someone think the bug is due to C3 codebase when it's just the user who did the mistake themself in their eventsheet (Even if sometimes actual bugs following all guidelines are closed for arbitrary reasons)

    But here is what has always been written in those guidelines :

    You never provided any support to anyone facing an issue with an addon : even if that addon use only documented feature. You always put the responsability on the addon dev (and you're probably right to do that) and that's all.

    So it doesn't seem worth it to destroy all the collective work and all projects relying on it, and make it impossible to expand the engine in relevant ways, for an issue you never ever took responsibility for to begin with. And your policy regarding this would be exactly the same after SDK2.

    Besides that, a lot of the most active addon devs like Skymen, piranha305, Mikal, Federico, MasterPose, Wackytoaster, Chadori, ppstudiomty or me replied in those 2 threads about SDK2. And it looks like none of us is aware of those users "with ruined projects" you keep mentionning again and again. (Also many of those addondev provide extremely qualitive support for their tools, they even fix broken addons made by dev that left the community, or provide their work under open source licence to let anyone fix it). The only reason some addons started breaking during the past few weeks is because you started your work to lock everything with SDK2. So all the arguments provided are looking very sus.

    Ashley

    Therefore addon developers have, as a minimum, over a year to update their addons (one year starting from the next stable release). We will review this schedule over time and milestones may be delayed if necessary, but we are publishing this as a guide for addon developers to plan with on the assumption that this schedule will be adhered to.

    I would like to request that this timeline be extended to at least 2 years. Not because it takes time for us plugin developers to port the plugins to Addon SDK v2, but because I doubt the API will be able to catch up with the needs of the plugin developers.

    For context, it's been 5 years, and the scripting interface is still incomplete. It's only recently that the majority of the features have been interfaced with the scripting API, but that's still only relative to the event sheet.

    Assuming it took a year to cover all essential APIs for the plugin developers to get to work, which I doubt, they still cannot just instantly port all the plugins; additional time is still needed.

    Even if the plugin developers can work concurrently as new APIs roll out as new update releases, you cannot expect them to, especially those who are doing this only out of the kindness of their hearts for the community in their free time.

    One of the main problems seems to be that people would like to be able to use more mechanics in an easier way, but that the development team cannot keep up with all the requests, thus ending up putting them aside for years, and that they are given priority to things not expected by the community. Now maybe I'm missing something and I'm talking nonsense, but doesn't construct have almost 2 million paying users? Isn't it possible to hire 2 or 3 more people to take care of creating the most requested new official behaviors?

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    Would love them to hire a developer to make plugins full time, even if its outsourcing some work to talented devs in the community, like they've been doing with example files.

    Guys at one point we just have to give Scirra the benefit of the doubt. I'm with the community in general but He's saying that he knows this is a big task, and they will do their best to expand the API. Extending the runway is easy and we got to let this play out for a few months to see if they deliver.

    Currently we are raging without having seen much proof either way.

    Guys at one point we just have to give Scirra the benefit of the doubt.

    I agree with this, I think the only beneficial thing for the time being.

    However, many are skeptics since:

    - SDKv1 was featureless even after years.

    - Even the Script Interface has the same problems.

    - Scirra always excuses themselves with being small, so they can't add many features.

    But let's leave the trust issues aside just for this once. Let's see how this plays out. The next beta releases should give us a good vision of what Scirra really will do.

    Would love them to hire a developer to make plugins full time, even if its outsourcing some work to talented devs in the community, like they've been doing with example files.

    I actually want that but for effects. Shaders can do so much magic.

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