Is Construct ready for a major game?

Are you kidding? As far as I was concerned a year ago, it already was. I've been working on my project for over a year now with numerous setbacks by Fate. I plan on it being a full-fledged, overworld-travelling, 4 save slot-having, combo-fighting, puzzle-solving, in-depth chapter-based story-telling, fluidly-animated platformer. I decided this a YEAR ago, and as you can tell, I've already been thinking about this for awhile before discovering Construct. If I thought Construct was ready THEN...

...Well, you know my answer. Seriously, how is this even a question? How can you NOT think Construct could make a major game at first sight?

Thank you everyone for the feedback, particularly the practical advice. We'll be going ahead with Construct.

Wait. In light of so much new glitchery I'm encountering in my .cap with newer versions of Construct, I take that back.

more than ready it has been for a long time, ive run into alot of bugs/game crashes in my big projects but all of them were fixable if i just tried isolating them and finding the problem events. mind you the problems weren't very clear but by moving things around i could prevent it.

It's a bit like the lottery though, they're probably not going to fix everything.

That's my worry too.

I think I'm right in saying that Rich is no longer part of the Dev team, and I wonder what sort of enthusiasm the remaining 2 Devs have for finishing Construct 1.

To be honest, if it wasn't for Ash posting now and again, I'd think that they'd already lost interest.

I think that they should take Rojo on board to get the project moving again.

Maybe Lucid too, if he was up for it.

I'm currently working on a big project that I hope to finish before the summer is out, so I'm hoping that I don't encounter the problems others are having.

Krush.

Backups are a must.

I can to 1000% agree with what Arima has posted.

My Main Event Sheet that is used for every Combat Layout has 4500+ Events and well over 150 Objects. I stopped counting how often Construct crashed because of some "Argument".

Just like Arima said, the Memory keeps rising and this makes editing events on huge Layouts nearly impossible, seeing as it takes around 20 - 30 Seconds to actually edit / create a new Event!

The only way for me to get around this was to save every time after I made around 20 Actions in the Event Sheet Editor and then relboot construct, else it says Invalid Argument and Crashes.

Ofcourse this got severely on my nerves after a time and being able to make steady progress was impossible aswell, seeing as everything took so much time to edit because of much events and objects.

So now I always make a new Layout in a new .cap because creating events is super fast and Memory usage low. Then I need to copy the Layout to the Main Cap wich is a very annoying task, seeing as sometimes things get messed up. So I agree here with Arima aswell.

If those 2 things would be fixed, or even only the Memory Bug, then Construct would have absolutely no Problems creating a big Project in my Opinion. Those two things are the only things that bothers me, and I have been working for over 3/4 Year now. These were the only problems I had.

However though, in the end Construct is way more awesome than Game Maker or MMF.

Just thought I'd post this, may be of help or something.

Regards,

Mr. Snooley

Tips for working with ginormous games:

Split up large event sheets. They become too unworkable when there's too many events in a single sheet. Don't make a new event sheet for this - actually make layouts for the event sheets you want to include. The reason for this is an event sheet that isn't tied to a layout will list every object in the game in the expression editor, whereas an event sheet that's tied to a layout won't.

However, because it doesn't list objects from other layouts, you need to either paste instances of the objects you want to work with in the layout or temporarily make them global.

More benefits of doing it this way are that you don't have to copy and paste events as much anymore and you don't have too worry about any issues that could result from copying and pasting between .caps.

[quote:2iq7k6ci]4500+ Events

I have no idea of what your doing, or what your experience is, but I cant possibly imagine a game having that many events and running each tick. Perhaps there are some optimizations your over looking?

Interesting feedback in this thread. Thanks for the posts.

I know Construct isn't perfect, and there are some serious problems that may be causing people problems with large projects. We hope to get the serious things fixed and release 1.0. But we actually wanted to shift focus and concentrate on Construct 2 soon. I can't guarantee that all problems will be fixed in 0.x and you may have to rely on workarounds. The codebase in 0.x is not fantastic and it can be very difficult to work with. These kinds of problems are part of the motivation behind C2 - it's going to be completely redesigned, architected for reliability and flexibility, and as a side effect things like 30 second saves can be avoided as well (which is difficult to fix with the binary .cap file format in 0.x).

I know this may be frustrating to many people who have invested so much in to Construct 0.x, but it does have serious architectural limitations. I doubt it can be taken much further than it is now, bar attempting fixes for the more serious problems. And C2 like the project already will be a spare time project. I hate to use this as a crutch, but we've never been able to guarantee fixes or support because this is essentially a hobby project. Some people watch TV, we write code. So I'm starting to see Construct 1 as a kind of a very big, complicated proof of concept, and C2 as the real thing getting going - we're much better at programming now, and some of us have professional experience to add to that.

So can you make a major game? I think you can, if you try to keep things simple - but I can't guarantee an easy time, unfortunately. That's not saying things will go completely smoothly with other tools either though!

[quote:3gladuls]4500+ Events

I have no idea of what your doing, or what your experience is, but I cant possibly imagine a game having that many events and running each tick. Perhaps there are some optimizations your over looking?

The original Eventsheet had 7500+ and the Program was pretty much dead then, so I allready optimized it and reduced it down to 4500. I allready use alot of Shortcuts and Families to reduce the Number of Events, but the Game simply needs all those events to run the way it should be (on a 20000 x 20000 Layout).

[quote:3gladuls]I know Construct isn't perfect, and there are some serious problems that may be causing people problems with large projects. We hope to get the serious things fixed and release 1.0. But we actually wanted to shift focus and concentrate on Construct 2 soon.

This sounds like it is uncerain if Construct 1.0 will ever be released, or did I just get it wrong?

And to keep ontopic: Like I wrote in my other Post, if People are willing to do some workarounds wich consume some time, it is possible to make a big Game. Just like Ashley said though, don't expect it to be a walk in the park.

The original Eventsheet had 7500+ and the Program was pretty much dead then, so I allready optimized it and reduced it down to 4500.

Wow, what kind of game is this? My game is a Metroid type engine with most features I need completed already. This includes missions, chat\cinematics system, inventory system, saving\loading, multiple enemies, a boss battle, upgrades, multiple weapons, etc. and my biggest event sheet is 150 events. The whole demo is under 600 events. I can't imagine most people's games having sheets in the 1000's.

Really, the only thing holding me back is the platform behavior jumping on slopes bug. And if that doesn't get fixed, I can just remake the levels and take out slopes. Not the best solution but it works.

-Lou

You know, Ash, maybe it would help a bit more if you guys got some extra help on the C2 project, at least to fill in for Dave. I imagine some people here would be glad to help out with the code... Providing that they know how to code in C++, of course. XD I'm learning C++ right now myself but nowhere near good enough to help out, so...

> The original Eventsheet had 7500+ and the Program was pretty much dead then, so I allready optimized it and reduced it down to 4500.

>

Wow, what kind of game is this? My game is a Metroid type engine with most features I need completed already. This includes missions, chat\cinematics system, inventory system, saving\loading, multiple enemies, a boss battle, upgrades, multiple weapons, etc. and my biggest event sheet is 150 events. The whole demo is under 600 events. I can't imagine most people's games having sheets in the 1000's.

I don't want to realy derail the Thread, so I'll just post a Link to a Preview I made here a few weeks ago. CheckMate

Because it's basically an Aeroplane game it needs a huge Environment, else you'd be from one end of the map to the other one in a matter of seconds. It's also pretty non-linear, so that brings in alot of code aswell.

To get back ontopic I need to say though that Construct actually impresses me in some way, seeing that it is actually trying to still do what I am telling it to, eventhough there is so much it needs to take care of.

When I made a huge Project in MMF2 it slowed down and got all messy pretty quick and doing steady progress was pretty impossible.

Eventhough you need some workarounds in Construct it can still get the job done.

(I was pretty close to giving up though XD)

Regards,

Mr. Snooley

[quote:2oiv1pib]You know, Ash, maybe it would help a bit more if you guys got some extra help on the C2 project, at least to fill in for Dave. I imagine some people here would be glad to help out with the code... Providing that they know how to code in C++, of course. XD I'm learning C++ right now myself but nowhere near good enough to help out, so...

couldn't agree more, for 2 people making such a huge project is a bit difficult, so if you could get some others to help then the development would be definitely speed up.