Ashley's Forum Posts

  • This has been discussed a lot in the past already. I don't think there's anything we can do about it.

    AFAIK it only affects devices that have not even updated the Google Play store apps for over two years, or have manually uninstalled updates to system apps (specifically the Android System Webview on Android 5-6). This should be a small minority of devices, and still shrinking.

    All you need to do is have Google Play updates enabled and allow it to update - or have done so at any point in the past two years - and it should work fine. We've designed an error message that tells people to do this that ought to appear if it's not supported, with links directly to the store. Why this message still seems to show up for people is still pretty much a mystery. Maybe a lot of people routinely disable updates and uninstall system apps? It seems unlikely...

    It's not feasible to backport the C3 runtime to very old browser engines - many of the huge performance increases and major new features rely on reasonably new browser technology. If you need support for much older browser engines, you could keep using the C2 runtime which has lower requirements - but then you'll miss out on all the features and performance improvements.

    I think the best solution is to be able to specify a minimum WebView version for your app, so it doesn't appear for people whose devices are too old/not up-to-date enough to run the app. Alternatively it could install any necessary WebView update at the same time as your app. I filed an issue with Google about this earlier this year. I think the best way to make this happen is for everyone to highlight how important it is to them on this Google issue requesting a solution to the problem.

  • This was already fixed in the latest releases of both C2 and C3.

  • If anyone sees this it would be incredibly helpful if you could press F12 and report any error messages that appeared in the browser console. This obviously should never happen, but without more details it's impossible for us to investigate this in any way.

  • See the manual entry covering 'Invoke download':

    Downloading is a browser feature and depends on the browser UI. Note that mobile apps don't run in browsers (there is no address bar etc), so the download feature isn't available there.

  • I guess Virtual Box doesn't include GPU drivers for Windows 7. It's common for VMs to only use software rendering. It should then fall back to the SwiftShader software renderer in Chromium, I don't know why it wouldn't be doing that (maybe that also is not supported in a VM?)

  • Well, on Steam the size hardly matters as I pointed out - anything less than 1GB is tiny by the standards of Steam.

  • Well, my tip to avoid the NW.js size overhead, is to not use NW.js. Why not publish to the web? An empty minified project with compressed transmission (as many servers do automatically) is just 240kb. It's an incredibly tiny overhead - far smaller even than other tools which have per-platform ports of native engines.

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  • Updated the original post with new downloads based on Chrome 78 (NW.js 0.42.0).

    Note: local file/folder saves are experimentally supported in the Chrome browser. Once that moves from experimental to enabled by default, there will no longer be enough unique features to justify the desktop downloads, so they will be retired. This will probably happen next year. I'd recommend switching to the browser version already if possible - see the linked thread for information on using local project files/folders in Chrome.

  • NW.js does provide a native EXE, in the sense there's a .exe file you double click and it runs.

    If you need a small file size is publishing to the web really not an option? That is also much easier to distribute and skips any install process, so is much more likely to reach lots of players. Normally people want a desktop app to publish to a store like Steam where 50GB+ game downloads are common, so a game in the region of 100-200MB is actually comparatively tiny there.

  • Tell them to read the case against native engines. Construct 3 has a sophisticated engine and compares well to native engines. I'd guess their impression is 5-10 years out of date. If you want a small export, you can always go for a HTML5 export - which is far smaller than most native apps could ever achieve!

  • Event 3 looks like it will always be true, so you'll be spamming the storage system with tons of storage requests checking if the item exists. You only need to do it once.

  • Have you tried the latest version? 0.33.3 is quite old now.

  • With the C3 runtime, the only browsers not supported are IE and Safari 10 and older (Safari 11 being a grey area since it's partially supported, fully supported from Safari 12+). All other browsers can be assumed to work, because they auto-update.

    The C2 runtime works with older browsers to the extent I think it would be hard to find something that doesn't support it these days. IIRC anything IE9+ will work. However the C2 runtime is considerably slower and has limited features.

  • Check the audio codec in the video. Proprietary formats are not supported in NW.js.

    This is the bugs forum so for further investigation you'd need to follow the guidelines.

  • I'm sure it works - several official features use it. E.g. try setting the text object's font size to -1 and it clamps it to 0.1. I can't tell why it's not working for you, I guess I'd need to see real running code.