A brief roadplan

We haven't really discussed publicly what we'll personally be doing with Construct post 1.0.

Here's our brief plan, in order of what we'll be doing first:

• Full rewrite of the IDE and Runtime, using Visual Studio 2008

• Create new project files, create clean header files. A lot of code can obviously be reused, but equally we'd like to change some silly things we did.
• Use the new MFC UI classes and remove our current library. Microsoft have brought out a set of UI components (Ribbon, property grid, UI) which is slightly better than ours, and we'd like to remove the non open-source components we use.
• Implement a Direct-X Event Sheet Editor as we go.

• Do a plugin translation system.

• Use Unicode so many other languages can be translated to.

• Pick up the SDL display class a previous user wrote and implement it with OpenGL, to provide an alternative renderer.

• Look for people who can port this to other platforms.

In all honesty, you might be better off using something like wxWindows, especially if your portability aim includes the development environment.

In all honesty porting the IDE isn't on our list of priorities; it'd be a huge job and we'd obviously have to make cutbacks on the UI and features (property grid, custom controls, ribbon, etc). Rewriting it may sound like a big job but with the code we have we're aiming to have it done quickly.

I'm not particularly bothered about porting to other platforms. C++ projects can, of course, be ported, but it's a do-it-yourself affair. We all only do this in our spare time and porting would be asking us to double the time we put in for maybe another 5 to 10% of users. Ask again when Windows market share falls considerably. Alternatively, you could try and find a developer willing to do the porting work.

I'm a little confused - I wouldn't expect construct itself to be ported to other platforms, but is exporting the game to run on other platforms still planned?

is exporting the game to run on other platforms still planned?

- Pick up the SDL display class a previous user wrote and implement it with OpenGL, to provide an alternative renderer.

- Look for people who can port this to other platforms.

As I understand this, they want to split the job: They'll make an alternative runtime that uses SDL and OpenGL (which are available on several platforms) instead of DirectX (which is Windows-only); but the current Construct developers' version of the new "alternative renderer" will still only run on windows.

But such an SDL/OpenGL version of the runtime will be much easier for someone else to port to a new platform. A port on the basis of the current DirectX runtime would have involved ripping out a lot of (DirectX-specific and therefore Windows-only) code and rewriting it to use something which works on the target platform (like frinstance SDL and OpenGL). But lo and behold, by version 1.4 or perhaps 2.0, the devs will already have done exactly that.

Yes that's the idea .

does this major rewrite mean that old caps will be rendered unopenable/usable? I hope not.

i dont think you guys would do that though.

No, we'll definitely have an importer for old .cap files.

I tried to build the plugin SDK examples with VS-express 2008 but unfortunately it depends on ATL which is only available in the non free versions. Its a shame since I don't think the plugins depends heavily on ATL or MFC functionality. Removing these dependencies would make plugin writing much more acessible to the wide public.

We're planning an express-compatible SDK.

No, we'll definitely have an importer for old .cap files.

The rewritten Construct imports (and converts?) without losing anything that has been made in the old cap-files?

That's right, that's what I said