Arima's Forum Posts

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  • And flash. Why haven't they disabled that?

    "The latest FUD is Microsoft?s claim that they won?t support WebGL because it?s insecure. They might have a little more credibility if they weren?t promoting a technology, Silverlight 5, that provides the EXACT SAME FEATURES with all the same issues. They can?t have it both ways. Either it?s possible to make this tech safe or else it?s not. If it is possible to make it safe in Silverlight 5 then it?s also just as possible in WebGL. If it?s not possible to make it safe Microsoft would have to come out and say (1) They are removing GPU access from Silverlight 5. (2) They are banning Unity3D from running in IE since it also provides access to the EXACT SAME FEATURES. (3) They are banning Flash 11 from running in IE since it also provides access to the EXACT SAME FEATURES."

    More here.

    A lot of the issues have also already had solutions found. Even some of microsoft's own employees apparently disagree about not supporting webgl.

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  • That's a good point, there isn't one specific strategy that will work for all games. I was letting too much of my own strategy color that comment about targeting PC first.

    Part of what drove it though is the impression that I got from everything that I've read is that it is in fact harder to get noticed on mobile than it is on PC. However, I don't know that for sure because getting a game noticed is not an exact science, so I could be wrong. It just seems the PC has more of an indie culture that websites are more willing to report on.

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  • ludei - by saying "do not load all the backgrounds at a time," what does that mean for cocoonjs's memory management? Does it load textures as they are used and unload them when they are not? Does that mean c2's layout by layout loading has been implemented, or is that your own memory management system? I'm very interested to know the specifics of how it works.

  • Lol, no worries. XD

  • So far, I've had a lot of headaches being a 1-man show trying to make something cross-platform. I know it can be done, evidenced by some great projects out there; it seems daunting, though. How have you fared in this arena?

    It depends how complex your project is and what level of devices you're targeting. If you're doing something with simple graphics and interactions, it's generally no problem at all. However, if you're doing something more complex, it can get a bit tricky.

    So far, getting my game to work on both desktop and touch devices hasn't been all that difficult. While it was somewhat more difficult than I expected (partially because I want to do some relatively complex touch interactions), it wasn't all that hard. It mainly required learning how to use the touch for ID expression and learning about things like overdraw and how to optimize for the weaker GPU hardware in mobile devices.

    Excellent points, m'lady. From a lot of articles, there seems to be a feeling that there's still a 'gold rush' in mobile, but I think your perspective here might be closer to reality.

    Actually, I'm male, my avatar is just of one of my game's main characters, sorry for the confusion. Basically what I get from articles and other developers is there is money but it's hard to get and most devs don't succeed at doing so because of insane competition of hundreds of new apps every day. One of the most important lessons I've read is to not to depend on simply being on the app store as a form of advertising. That only works if you get featured by apple or get on the top seller lists, which will most likely only happen if you advertise elsewhere.

    I was wondering about how big an impact something like OUYA or Gamestick is going to make on HTML5 projects. One of my concerns there is close to what you mentioned: what happens when all those android games get ported over by their developers? It can't be too much of a stretch to tweak it for OUYA, for example. Is it going to be another case of a super-saturated market like mobile now?

    That depends how successful and lucrative those markets turn out to be. Where there is gold, you'll find people, lots of people, trying to get it.

    I read somewhere that iOS has something like 270 million devices out there. My guess is there will be way more competition at the start than iOS had at first because of the ease of porting games that are already on android to them, but way less than if you released for android phones/tablets because most of the games on android won't be coded to work with the controllers of these new platforms, meaning less competition than if you released on Google play.

    Also, piracy as I hear is completely rampant on android, and even those who don't pirate are less prone to pay for things, and it doesn't help matters that users can buy something, return it and get a refund yet still keep the app. I don't know if the new android consoles will help to mitigate those factors or not.

    What about mobile web gaming? Where does that fit into the picture with all this?

    The problem with mobile web gaming is monetization. With an app store, the company already has your credit card information, so it's a very easy process to buy something and people feel safe about it. On the web, people have to give credit card information to a company they're generally not familiar with, and as such people are far more reluctant to do so. There's in game ads, but those generally pay a pittance. There's also marketjs, but I'm not sure exactly how lucrative that can be.

  • HTML5 allows for easy porting to multiple platforms, so in my mind there's no reason to not target as many platforms as possible, as long as your game's design allows for play with a mouse/touchscreen/controller.

    That said, the mobile gold rush is long since over. There's too many devs and not enough gold. There's plenty of money to be made there, but getting it is a difficult challenge with so many others attempting the same. Too many devs have been making the mistake of only targeting mobile, thinking the gold rush is still in effect. In my opinion, PC should be the primary target with mobile as a bonus platform.

    The new focus on android consoles might create a new smaller gold rush, with less competition at first on those storefronts, but it will have fewer customers than the smartphone market and still will have more competition than the mobile market had at first because there are already games on android that can be run on those devices.

  • It looks like it may be a bug. Logically it should be working. However it would be more efficient to have the variable conditions first then the for each condition.

    For more info on for each, check out the for each tutorial.

  • An iPhone 1 or 2? The hardware in those are very weak and have very little memory, I'm surprised it runs at all. Ipad 1 is underpowered as well, though not as much.

    Power of two is still important for how graphics cards work (though many or possibly all modern gpus can have rectangular power of two textures, such as 64x128) but c2 does it for you on export. 4 512x512 textures will take up the same space as 1 1024x1024 texture and should be basically the same speed to draw, unless the early iPhones don't support textures of that size. If they don't, then it could either slam the frame rate or break the texture up automatically, I don't know.

  • Which iPhone and ipad are you using?

    I seem to recall reading that ludei is going to implement c2's layout by layout loading, that would solve your problems. Hopefully they'll have that implemented soon - you could ask them via their website if they have any idea when it might be implemented.

  • Still, I don't want a tacked-on 3D solution, an in-house thing would be better (and perhaps the only viable alternative).

    I'm not convinced. I really dislike the idea of having two products ? what if I want to use both 2-D and 3-D together? It also depends just how much 3-D capability would be incorporated ? if it's just simple displaying of a model and maybe some basic lighting, There's no reason to redo anything from scratch when it can be made as a plugin instead. Making two products would be far, far more work for Ashley for no reason.

    I'm also not sure how it would be better. The only thing I can think of that there might be a potential issue with is panning around a 3-D world in the layout editor. I can imagine that could be worked around elegantly by having a 3-D camera that's separate from the normal 2-D one that the user can switch between.

    Keep in mind construct 2 was developed with a clear intention of integrating one (or maybe more?) physics engines later, so that's why it succeeded,

    Even if Ashley didn't intend to incorporate 3-D from the start, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be difficult to implement. It might be, but you seem to have decided that it will be difficult and wouldn't succeed without knowing the underlying architecture like Ashley does.

    and yet if you read Ashley's comments, it's clear he believes Box2D generates way too much garbage.

    That doesn't mean a 3-D engine would generate too much garbage as well. They're not the same thing.

    I don't know if he cleaned up the code manually or left it as is, but it probably took a ton of work - and, again, this is something he was planning when C2 development started.

    If it took a ton of work, it didn't slow him down that much. There were seven releases in the month that physics was introduced.

    Anyway, it's irrelevant because Ashley has said that there are no short-term plans to add 3-D, so even if it does get added eventually, it'll be quite a while until then. Unless some third-party plug-in developer makes it first.

  • I'm not saying Scirra should jump into a new product or try to cram 3D into construct 2 - First of all, scirra is too small to run two huge projects at once. Second of all, such a product would have to be designed from scratch.

    Not necessarily - 3d could be theoretically incorporated like box2d was, by using an open source 3d js library, like one of the ones linked to above. I don't know the technical details (apparently three.js is incompatible with the way c2 does things), but one of them might be implementable with far more ease than making an entire separate product. After all, basic 3d was added to CC and it didn't require a rewrite or separate product.

  • I would pay for it, but having 2 separate products would be a mistake IMO. 3d could be incorpated into c2, or into the 'next version' of c2 - instead of calling it c3 it could be called c3D or something, but there would still only be one product like photoshop going from cs2 to cs3.

    With 3d incorporated into it rather than two separate products, that way you get the best of both, can blend 2d and 3d together in the games made with it, and it would likely be much easier for Ashley to develop. It could possibly be integrated using one of the open source 3d js libraries like box2d was.

    It's all speculative though, since 3d hasn't been confirmed anyway.

  • Good point, moved to open topic.