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> > I'm a super fan of SVG but I don't think it is all crazy not to support SVG right now. Almost no one on the planet is using it and most people think it is dead. Compare the use of Photoshop vs. Illustrator. Most people think in bitmaps, not vectors. Thinking in vectors is more work.
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> Photoshop and Illustrator are intended for totally different things so just because more people use Photoshop doesn't mean anything.
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> But Adobe now support SVG with their new 'Edge' HTML5 animation software. I just quickly made this SVG animation with it! <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle">
My point was that for most game developers and artists, it is easier to work with bitmaps than with vectors. That's why Canvas has caught on so fast. Right now Construct 2 is bitmap and Canvas-based and I don't expect that to change fast or get a lot of support.
I couldn't figure out your sample. What am I supposed to be seeing?
Adobe has been the major supporter of SVG since the beginning, but they've not done very well with it. The only really good SVG application right now is Inkscape, but I haven't seen any SVG-based application design tools.
I still haven't tried out the SVG plugin, but I'm still not sure what it really does. I'll get to it!
SVG is extremely cool but none of the big kids are giving much focus to it. One the one hand there are historical reasons. I have all 12 books on SVG but most of them are out of print or not very useful.
Oddly enough, all major browsers support most of SVG but there are nooks and crannies that don't quite work well and aren't clear.
Still, SVG is fascinating, but I think too advanced for the average developer of games. Prove me wrong! <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle">
For my example you should being seeing a SVG graphic of a guys head, which just does a loop animation when you click it. Very simple example! <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle">
Being as it's SVG if you use the browser to zoom in as much as possible (CTRL +), you'll see that the image does not distort or get pixelated being as it's vector based.
Now heres my problem... if you do the same with a HTML5 bitmap game created in Construct (or anything else) it becomes a blurry mess, being as it uses bitmaps it has to run at a specific window size, like 800x420 or whatever, you cant scale it. So if i wanted to turn that game in to a fullscreen phone or Windows 8 app, and if a person with a high res screen ran the game fullscreen it's going to look like a blurry pixelated mess being scaled up to something like 1920x1080 (and even phone screens range from 480x320 all the way to 1280x720 res). So this is the main reason i want vectors/SVG, so i dont have to worry about really poor looking blurry bitmaps on different screen sizes and resolutions.
Windows 8 Metro apps also fully support SVG, so if it works in IE10 (which is used to render HTML5 based apps on Win 8) then i'm not bothered if any other browsers have a problem with SVG because it wont be running in another browser anyway. Or even if i make a web based game that uses SVG, for all the tests i've done so far SVG renders and animates correctly in all the main browsers and their latest versions. So i dont think browser support or bugs is any issue here.
And i'm curious why you think that using vectors is more work?
With design tools like Illustrator or Flash, creating vector graphics for games is often the near same process of how you would create the same graphics in Photoshop. Theres some limits to vectors but for most 2D games the process would be almost exactly the same. And Photoshop actually uses vectors for some of the drawing tools! But unlike Flash or Illustrator you cant save the work in a vector or SVG format for web, it instead gets converted to bitmap.
Or do you mean the more technical side of things? Because Flash and it's success is the best possible example of how easy it is to use and create games with vectors and why Construct REALLY needs it. Flash has had this support since it came out in 1996 and no one has ever complained about vectors being too hard to use. With Flash it's never really affected how i work, or even had much affect of performance. Maybe it's different in some HTML5 tools (? i dont have much experience here apart from Adobe Edge but SVG is easy to use in that as well!) but with Flash it's VERY easy, if not better, because i often have more control over vectors compared to bitmaps and can easily edit vector art.
So as someone who's been using vector art in Flash/AIR, 3D game engines and web content since around 2001 it feels as though tools that lack support is like going backwards in time to the 90's as it really is superior in so many ways <img src="smileys/smiley18.gif" border="0" align="middle">
.... Sorry for long post! LOL