Construct 2 - 3D Version - KICKSTARTER Campaign

newt hmmm ... well that's strange ...

Why would you get snubbed for requesting a "wishful thinking" forum?

That would be a perfect place, high up on the main forums, where people can put their feature requests.

DrewMelton A separate 3D program with the ease of Construct 2 would be awesome for the kind of project that you're doing. I don't know how to do "isometric" in Construct 2 - so my game is a straight top-down view of the characters and environments.

Would you happen to have a demo of the game so I can take a look at it? I don't need the source file. I'm just referring to putting it up in a browser so I can see what it looks like.

On another note ... Zbrush makes me cringe. It's the only 3D program that given me a good a** kicking. I've used Maya, Mudbox, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Cinema 4D with no major problems - but Zbrush? Good Lord !!!

Zbrush is a bit quirky. I only use it for a bit of sculpting here and there. I use Modo for just about everything. It even does sculpting itself pretty well.

Anyway, my game is way under construction, so I don't want to release any demos until I get some more done. I'll show off a screenshot of what I have so far.

Keep in mind that the game is not ready to show off, so this will be one of the rare screenshots I actually post of it. When I get my main 3d characters done, I'll probably start an actual thread on it.

This is a rogue-like, so it focuses on randomness and replayability.

Notes:

1. Please ignore the Golden Axe sprites. I will be replacing them with 3d models soon. I just needed a placeholder while I work on the code.

2. There will be changes. I have a new character creation system that I'm working on, so the stats in the upper left will be replaced.

3. I'm still making gameplay decisions, so remember that nothing is final yet.

4. The game will play like Civilization with its turn-based approach. That's why you see red and green icons here and there.

5. The levels are randomly generated and can be destroyed. Thanks to the updates to the pathfinding regeneration, I can now have the walls be destroyed.

6. The fog of war is currently disabled.

7. I'm hoping for a spring/summer release next year. So, lot's of work to be done! If I didn't work alone, it'd probably go faster but whatever.

DrewMelton Zbrush being quirky - lol, yes indeed.

Well from what I've seen so far. It looks awesome - even if you're using "Golden Axe" sprites. Would love to see how this would have looked like, in an easy-to-use 3D Game Engine, with your talents.

After you're done with your current game, do you have any plans to put your engine in the Asset Store?

For my next game, I was thinking about a turn-based RPG - but I have no idea where to start with a project of that magnitude.

I was first looking at "RPG Maker", but although its easy to use, its screen resolution is low and you do have limits to your tilesets. That wont be good if i'm planning to sell a high resolution RPG game for PC.

(This is a redux of what I post regularly on this forum on the subject)

I'm not convinced an easy-3D-game-builder product is as realistic as you think, especially if trying to keep Construct 2's philosophy of "not a cookie cutter engine", and mainly trying to provide primitives from which to build a totally custom game from. Fimbul touched on a few issues but a few others that I think would be an issue:

• 3D math is a significant jump in difficulty over 2D math. Most students touch on sin and cos before leaving school, and they're really handy to know for game design. When it comes to 3D math, how's your knowledge of quaternions and matrices?
• Designing 3D assets is a significant jump in difficulty over 2D assets. Most people can scrawl something in Paint or do some light pixel art, but in comparison how many people are competent at 3D modelling tools? Also a 2D layout editor is nice and easy to use, but custom 3D level design on a 2D screen can be a pain in the ass (at least in my pretty limited experience of designing half life levels way back)
• Competing with the visual quality of the top-end 3D games (think Crysis-grade and newer) is tough, but IMO it's realistic for indie developers to match commercial quality with 2D titles. (See "The Next Penelope"!)

I think a "Construct 3D" is the top example of "imagining feature requests to solve everything magically with no effort". Real-world solutions always have their caveats.

Ashley, Well, if that's how you really feel about it - OK, well fine then.

[quote:2dasi8yv]I think a "Construct 3D" is the top example of "imagining feature requests to solve everything magically with no effort"

and don't try to insult your customers' intelligence by saying that I'm asking for some sort of magic formula!

Even for a game engine with no programming, I still have to create all of the assets and use logic to make those assets work as a cohesive game. In other words ... IT DOES TAKE EFFORT ... no matter how you try to spin it !

But anyway, don't be surprised if a year from now - or even 5 years from now ...

some other programmer (working for a competing company) creates a 3d engine that winds up proving you wrong.

I'm done with the negativity I'm getting here, so I'm not reading any more replies.

Have a good day

DrewMelton Zbrush being quirky - lol, yes indeed.

Well from what I've seen so far. It looks awesome - even if you're using "Golden Axe" sprites. Would love to see how this would have looked like, in an easy-to-use 3D Game Engine, with your talents.

After you're done with your current game, do you have any plans to put your engine in the Asset Store?

For my next game, I was thinking about a turn-based RPG - but I have no idea where to start with a project of that magnitude.

I was first looking at "RPG Maker", but although its easy to use, its screen resolution is low and you do have limits to your tilesets. That wont be good if i'm planning to sell a high resolution RPG game for PC.

Yeah, turn-based games are fun but really hard too. You have to make sure the enemies follow the rules and take their turns when they are supposed to. I have had to rewrite the code and rethink ideas numerous times to get it where it is now.

I didn't want to make the game a click-fest like Diablo. I wanted it to be more like a board game where you think out your moves and act carefully. You know like, do I heal or attack, should I move this character to a better location, and so on.

I've never tried RPG maker. C2 is pretty much the only thing I've put any time into, and I've only had it since last October. I didn't even decide to get into game making until about a year ago.

I didn't even know you could put engines on the asset store, lol. I haven't even looked at it. I'm not sure if I'd do it though unless I got a lot out of it. It's been a ton of work.

Judging by the replies in this thread, we would have to look elsewhere for a 3d engine. I'm fine with using C2 as a 2d platform for the moment. I can make things look really nice without blowing away people's computers. In fact, I could add lots of details into the environment if I didn't want to make it randomly generated. I still might add some details actually.

As for what I'll do when I finish this game, I'm not sure. I may move on to another program or keep using C2. It just depends on what I want to make and whether I keep working alone.

and don't try to insult your customers' intelligence by saying that I'm asking for some sort of magic formula!

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, but in my long experience of working on Construct 2 it's common for customers to hype up feature requests and then when we produce them and everyone gets what they wanted, it's just a bit of a non-event, usually because of the caveats. The best example I have of this was everyone getting super excited about multiplayer - it topped our old feature request polls by a long way, everyone brought it up constantly, frequently commented things like "I'm going to have to choose a different tool if you don't add support", etc. Then we added it, and we can see from the signalling it's not being used by anywhere near the percentage of users who voted for it in the feature poll, probably because thinking about networking and host/peer relationships is hard, even in an event system which does much of the heavy lifting for you. So I am convinced that it's a real effect that in people's imaginations, features or product ideas are a lot better and more exciting than they can actually produce in real life.

Also, I've lost count the number of times the announcement that we will support a feature gets more likes/tweets/shares than the actual announcement that we actually have then released it! So it's even measurable there.

[quote:22gv3mg9]But anyway, don't be surprised if a year from now - or even 5 years from now ...

some other programmer (working for a competing company) creates a 3d engine that winds up proving you wrong.

I'm prepared for that possibility, but I would be extremely curious as to how they solve the problem. The way I see it is it's to do with your target audience's training and education, and you can't improve people's training and education by programming alone.

I'm prepared for that possibility, but I would be extremely curious as to how they solve the problem. The way I see it is it's to do with your target audience's training and education, and you can't improve people's training and education by programming alone.

I'm thinking the next big thing in 3D tools will be a voxel-based game engine.

• There aren't any of those on the market today, and most existing engines can't be adapted into working with voxels with native-like levels of performance
• programming a voxel engine is a lot like traditional 2D programming (just add a Z coordinate and done, basically - it's as simple as an isometric game is today)
• voxel art is just pixel art in 3D, and there are tools coming out that help with it
• There isn't much catching up to do (you're basically trying to outcompete minecraft in terms of visual quality, which isn't hard at all)

Theres already a ton of Minecraft knockoff engines out there. None seem to be interested in a non code type editor.

I do wonder what MS plans to do about that now that they have acquired Mojang.

Hi, i'm the developer of the Q3D plugin.

I understand the dream you have. I love the design of constructs programming interface, and would love to have it for something 3D, and that's why i'm currently developing the plugin. Right now it's very basic and many people misunderstand the complexity of 3D games and expect making one will be anywhere as easy as making a 2D one. Everything Ashley is saying is completely true, 2D engines are much more widely accessible because of the fact drawing is such a basic skill, and the fact most math you're going to use for common things doesn't really require anything beyond high school trigonometry. He's not really insulting anyone's intelligence by claiming most people construct is aimed at wont have studied the more complicated math and sub systems involved yet. He's simply stating construct is meant to appeal to a demographic which doesn't really overlap the demographic who are capable of working in 3D.

I think i'll be able to somewhat achieve the goal of "easy" 3D using construct, but there are always caveats. People will need to understand that lighting and shader building, preprocessing of lighting, the vector math and linear algebra and every complicated trick which is situation specific and complicated about 3D cannot be simply tucked away under the hood as an automatic process which the engine will take care of. In a way my goal is to move towards doing that with future updates for Q3D, but as it stands now the plugin is meant to enable 3D and nothing more. Doing what you're asking for in its entirety is very much easier said than done. 3D games require careful engineering in order to perform properly in a variety of different situation. There are a lot of challenges i face in developing a plugin to make 3D work for an audience that will have very high expectations about performance and ease of use.

I think you aren't really looking deeply enough into the repercussions if scirra officially focus on making their tool support 3D. A lot of people could unanimously agree that Construct is an incredible 2D game engine, really the best around. If they were to focus on adding in 3D or a new 3D tool, that would mean they really wouldn't be able to keep making it the best 2D game engine around. They would have to put an incredible amount of effort to get something okay, and people would likely be unhappy because the reality of 3D game development would clash with their expectations. There's no point for them to stop working on a fantastic 2D tool, to make an alright 3D one, which would really never compete very strongly with better established 3D tools like unity or engines like Unreal.

I think the devs should focus on making the Construct SDK better so that more people can make construct do more things than it currently can. Right now extending functionality through the editor isn't possible, and we're left to basically only have some basic object parameters to control everything. the ability to do more complex drawing and operations in the layout, launch popup windows to organize properties better akin to custom "image editors" etc. would be a great step in making higher quality plugins possible.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, but in my long experience of working on Construct 2 it's common for customers to hype up feature requests and then when we produce them and everyone gets what they wanted, it's just a bit of a non-event, usually because of the caveats. The best example I have of this was everyone getting super excited about multiplayer - it topped our old feature request polls by a long way, everyone brought it up constantly, frequently commented things like "I'm going to have to choose a different tool if you don't add support", etc. Then we added it, and we can see from the signalling it's not being used by anywhere near the percentage of users who voted for it in the feature poll, probably because thinking about networking and host/peer relationships is hard, even in an event system which does much of the heavy lifting for you. So I am convinced that it's a real effect that in people's imaginations, features or product ideas are a lot better and more exciting than they can actually produce in real life.

People always want what they don't have, and when they have it... they don't really use it. Just look at all the torrents... the majority of these folks just horde there downloads.

Guru courses end up gathering bad sectors on external harddrives, and nobody in the world has enough time to watch all the movies that get downloaded. Nice to have all the movies, just not enough time to watch them all.

Same apply's to software, features etc. Nice to be able to do xyz, but human nature to not do xyz for any number of reasons.

Personally I love the multiplayer feature. Rather do multiplayer in C2 than unity.

Just got to get it more stable. And sort out Dropped connections. But with a little time it should iron out. Not C2 or signal server related - i think, but more cross browser (firefox to chrome works better than chrome to chrome) but a few niggly's need to be sorted on that end. Like samsung S3/4 chrome mobile not working webtrc, firefox yes, but chrome on S3/4 no webtrc - go figure.

Hi, i'm the developer of the Q3D plugin.

Hey, I was looking at your plugin and wanted to ask some questions.

I posted a screenshot of my game on the previous page. Do you think I could supplement that with 3d objects? Essentially I would just need wall tiles, maybe floor tiles, and the characters.

The main reason would be so I could have realtime lighting. You know like if each character was carrying a torch or something. It would add a lot to the cave ambiance.

The map is created entirely from an array. I would also have a lot of animations that are very important for triggering events (like using a turn).

DrewMelton

At the moment its difficult to mix 2D and 3D assets as the 3D window take up an entire layer, so you wouldn't be able to Z-order your construct sprites with the 3D content for example, as this would require some way of magically pushing them through the depth buffer. I don't think you'd be able to easily do what you're asking unless you were ok with the sprites always being above the background (i.e. nothing hidden behind walls) I don't know if this is clear, but imagine you had to put your background entirely on one layer, and your characters on a layer above. This wouldn't be a problem for some games, like lets say the dungeons in 2D zelda games, but in isometric it might look weird, i.e. not being able to go behind something you should, like lets say the small squares of dungeon wall in that picture, so the way you interact with terrain would need to be modified to "hide" that fact. Feel free to ask more questions i don't know if my answer is clear enough, as I've mentioned Q3D is difficult to use and doesn't hold your hand in anything at the moment, so you'd have to be ready to make a lot of low level systems and understand some of the limitations with how lights work etc. For example you can't always have more than 4 lights at a time effecting any one object; these are little weird things that are inherent to how shaders are handled on a GPU with ANGLE. You kinda have to be ready to scratch your head and work things like this out and understand there are limitations with the current plugin, and really with WebGL in general. Also the plugin is only made to work with browsers / Native Node-Webkit. Q3D makes 3D in construct possible, but certainly not very easy.

I'm planning to eventually (although this wont be anytime soon), create custom sprite objects based on the construct sprite objects that can be used with the plugin, but as of now there are other features i'm working on. Really if 15$ isn't much to you it would probably interest you to try the plugin, but if you feel uncertain about spending the money for something you may not use, I wouldn't recommend you purchasing it yet. If you feel uncomfortable working around limitations, or coding complicated code, or using an unfamiliar workflow, i wouldn't recommend it. I'm working to improve usability as I've stated, but updates take a lot of time, and realistically I can't make everyone happy.

QuaziGNRLnose Thanks for the explanation.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but the wall sprites are actually considered characters when it comes to z-ordering. Both the characters and the wall objects are basically treated the same and are in the same family. It was the only way I could get them to order correctly since each wall tile is basically its own entity. I don't know if this makes any difference to what you were saying though. The "ground" is essentially the background.

The wall tiles were made in 3d and exported as a png, and the characters will be the same when I finish them. However, they could be obj files just as easily, as long as I can import the animations. The ground is just a 2d texture that repeats.

QuaziGNRLnose I've been following the Q3D thread quite sometime now, so far I'm impressed that you made 3D possible. I have a few question though, are going to take Q3D as a serious commercial commitment?

I'm interested to purchase it, but I have no use of it now as I'm currently hooked up with MP now (3month and counting), I would be eternally grateful if you can come up with a manual (make it publicly available) up to official manual standard at least, or the more elaborate the better.

Maybe it just me but I'm a person who read the manual before purchasing something, think of it as a selling point.