This is to officially announce that Scirra has retired the old and unmaintained Construct Classic in favour of the newer and actively maintained Construct 2.
Hopefully this will not come as a surprise, because it has effectively been retired for the past year or so. This announcement is merely to put an official statement on the matter. We recommend Classic users move to Construct 2 and we strongly recommend new users to choose Construct 2.
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Construct Classic was released in 2007 by volunteer students working in their spare time while in full-time education. It was made as a hobby, and we were surprised and glad to see how popular it became. However as a consequence of learning how to program while working on an enormous project, it had serious architectural limitations (such as having no good way to support other platforms than the Windows desktop), and was infamously buggy (even ardent supporters admit there are weird issues to avoid, and you have to learn which parts of the program work). In short it was obvious that Classic was not going to go anywhere in the long term.
Subsequently in February 2011 we announced our intention to shift our focus to Construct 2, a complete ground-up rewrite with a focus on a portable HTML5 engine and a robust, stable editor. I would encourage you to re-read the thread to understand more about the decision. Shortly after that post we released the first public preview of Construct 2, and in the subsequent two years it's reached a point where it exceeds Classic on a great many fronts. There are still a couple of edge features that C2 doesn't cover, such as mesh distortion, but the list is dwindling and we do aim to cover these eventually with C2 as well. And on the other hand, C2 has many features that Classic lacks, such as portability to lots of platforms, a sensible Families system based off inheritance, Z Order editor, selection wrapping, continuous preview, persistent layouts, asynchronous pathfinding, and more.
Construct 2 is commercial software. Please understand that Classic was developed by volunteer students who could afford to live off student loans while in full-time education. That's no longer the case, and we have to make a living like everyone else does - but in return we can now afford to work full-time on development, rather than Classic's patchy schedule of whenever we were free.
We had a couple of community-maintained releases of Classic, but eventually all the developers moved on. For about a year now there has been no development activity on Classic at all. We had started to describe it as "effectively retired", but to our surprise some new users have still been coming to our site and choosing to use Classic instead of Construct 2, then making support requests when they had problems or questions. It really makes no sense for new users to choose Classic when it's unmaintained, and being a tiny company (there are 3 of us) the idea of supporting or maintaining Classic is out of the question. This has prompted us to officially retire Classic.
The source code of Classic is still available on SourceForge, and in the spirit of the open source project we will leave it there. However I wouldn't recommend anyone attempt any further work on it. The code is of such poor quality we decided to throw out the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that make up Classic and start all over again. If you have any interest in working on an editor, I would strongly recommend you start from scratch.
We recommend all Construct Classic users make plans to migrate to Construct 2 if they are not already in the process of doing so. We also strongly recommend new users choose Construct 2 instead of Classic.
The Construct Classic forums have all been collapsed to sub-forums of the Construct Classic Discussion forum, to de-emphasise them from the main forum list. We are keeping the forums open because they require almost no maintenance, and we don't want to unnecessarily upset anyone who still uses Classic. However I anticipate that these forums will eventually fall silent, and then we may see fit to remove them completely. If this worries you, perhaps consider setting up a separate discussion forum of your own. Over the next few days we will be de-emphasising Classic from the rest of our official pages on the Scirra.com website, and removing the Construct Classic download links. (It will still be available directly from SourceForge, as ever, where we intend to leave it indefinitely.)
Thank you for your interest in Construct Classic; we always enjoyed the active community here during the Classic days, and it's part of what spurred us on to make Construct 2, which we now make a living from. The community has done a lot for us, and we hope we've done a lot for you too with our work on Classic and C2 as well. However the time has come to move on. Remember that "in a rapidly advancing world, to stand still is to move backwards."