cjbruce's Forum Posts

  • Oh dear, has this been abandoned? For what it has it it very impressive and although I can figure it all out on my own I'd rather not since I paid money for it.

    He isn’t developing it anymore, but the Q3D manual should still be available. I am hoping someone does a threejs or babylonjs implementation for the new C3 runtime.

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    > Speaking of which, this looks like it might be a great problem for a GPU. I imagine you could run a similar algorithm about 1,000,000 times faster with a GPU's parallel processing. R0J0hound, by any chance do you know if it is possible to do Unity-style compute shaders on the GPU with WebGL?

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    Maybe this: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js

    [quote:137auibi]gpu.js is a JavaScript Acceleration library for GPGPU (General purpose computing on GPUs) in Javascript. gpu.js will automatically compile simple JavaScript functions into shader language and run them on the GPU. In case a GPU is not available, the functions will still run in regular JavaScript.

    zenox98, this is life-changing! Thank you!

    So many of our simulations could benefit from GPU acceleration. I'm thinking make a javascript call to gpu.js to return an array, then use C2 to visualize the results. This is awesome!

  • I fiddled with it a bit more, didn't find any worthwhile changes.

    On a performance note I get 6-7 fps on my machine. I made the entire thing in javascript completely independent from Construct and got 22 fps, but that's also with a 360x360 grid instead of 50x50 and I'm not doing anything fast with the rendering.

    I found that fun. I'm probably going to do that sort of thing more and more. No engine, no editor, completely diy, and no limits. Completely carefree, and it actually isn't harder and doesn't take much longer than doing it in a game maker. Sorry for the off-topic tangent, it doesn't help with the op in relation to this software.

    Speaking of which, this looks like it might be a great problem for a GPU. I imagine you could run a similar algorithm about 1,000,000 times faster with a GPU's parallel processing. R0J0hound, by any chance do you know if it is possible to do Unity-style compute shaders on the GPU with WebGL?

  • Pay close attention to memory. On a 4-year-old iPad, I like to keep memory usage down below 130 MB. On the same project, I can use 1 GB of memory without loading problems on my laptop.

  • Time to move to Unity which is 100 more powerful and FREE. I have C2 pro licence, but I don't seethe point in upgrading my licence to yearly payment for the same futures as in C2

    I would recommend Unity, but also Construct 2, and Construct 3. I pay for all of them, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses:

    Unity

    • $16/month for Unity Teams: 25 GB of cloud storage + 4-person Unity Collaborate
    • $100 one-time for Steam
    • $25 one-time for Android
    • $100/year for iOS
    • When we publish next year, we are planning to spend an additional $35/month to get rid of the "Made With Unity" branding.
    • Tremendously flexible, and produces great results for 3D games
    • Extremely bloated editor
    • Creates extremely large packages upon export
    • Unity WebGL export is useless for 3D games. Its exports are ridiculously bloated (2 hours to export + 1 GB for the project + hundreds of megabytes of memory use) and slow (5 fps for something I could get running at 60 fps in Q3D). We are hoping to make an AirConsole version of the game, and I'm dreading the fact that I will probably need to write a three.js or babylon.js version by hand. I could probably do a limited version of the game with Construct 2 + Q3D, but by then Q3D will be four years old with no updates.
    • Bottom line: If you are exporting to Steam, iOS native, or Android native, and making a 3D game, Unity is a no-brainer. If you are making anything for HTML5, Unity WebGL is mostly nonfunctional for desktop web, and entirely nonfunctional for mobile web.

    Construct 2

    • $430 for a professional license (one-time payment)
    • $600/year for web hosting to handle 50,000-100,000 pageviews/month (shared with all web projects)
    • C2 is the best thing around for making HTML5 content. The vast majority of my user base is HTML5-only (education).
    • Supports Q3D, which is the only reason I still use it.

    Construct 3

    • $150/year for a business license
    • $600/year for web hosting (concurrent with C2 projects)
    • The C3 editor works on my MacBook Air. This is huge for me, as carrying around a second laptop for development is really cumbersome.
    • I do all of my 2D development with Construct 3 now. It is the right combination of fast and lightweight, and it produces relatively tiny exports.

    For HTML5 export, Construct is WAY better than Unity. Since all of my current development income is from HTML5 work, switching to Unity is a risk. I am banking on the income I make from our first big Steam game to make Unity development financially viable.

    Why am I currently using all three? Because each of them is the right tool for a different job. For my team, Unity is not free -- it is the most expensive of the three tools. However, the cost of the software in all three cases is much smaller than the cost of maintaining an LLC, attorneys, purchasing assets, etc., and utterly insignificant compare to the costs associated with the amount of time I spend at it. For a 1500-hour project, labor costs are around $75,000.

  • I am an absolute beginner and while I know how to use Constuct, I want to learn JavaScript so that I get more flexibility with my work. I just wanted to know where I should start from, how do I learn the stuff that helps me with creating games and plugins for Construct.

    Do you have any programming background in languages other than JavaScript? If so, then I would recommend going to a site like to learn the syntax. If not, then jumping straight into C3 plugin programming is a really difficult place to start learning programming in general. Not impossible, but it will take several thousand hours (a few years of several hours each day) before you become truly proficient.

  • > Are you thinking of making a game with the ability to talk with outside world in any way? (I.e. multiplayer)

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    > If so, you might want to learn about networking.

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    > Other than that, Construct is pretty great out of the box for what you are looking to do. I would certainly recommend it above something like Unity for a top-down pixel art game because of the ease of the learning curve.

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    Thank you for the response!!

    I am not looking at multiplayer, there is a long way to go before I even think of going in that direction. I am just looking at some JavaScript tutorials, I mean I want to learn something that specifically complements game making in Construct, so I really need some suggestions on that. There are plenty of tuts on JavaScript, but I once I learn the basics, I want to have a clear direction. It would be great if someone can list out the key things that I need to focus on.

    For JavaScript, I recommend starting with . It took me 4 dedicated days to get all the way through the html, css, and JavaScript courses. Over the next weekend I purchased shared server space, then started working on MySQL and php so that I could do both static and dynamic pages. After 4 more dedicated days of php, I was comfortable enough with the principles of both client side (JavaScript) programming and server side (php) programming that I could start building a basic web app that gave my students the ability to interact with each other on the web. I didn’t discover Construct 2 until a year later, so I already had a year of web programming under my belt. It helped to already know how a web page was laid out when I was first learning Construct, but it wasn’t strictly necessary.

    Even though I spend most of my client-side programming time in Construct, I would still recommend starting out on w3schools. Do the html, css, and JavaScript tutorials, then take the quizzes at the end. Once you have been through those, then try making a simple webpage from scratch that includes some sort of JavaScript or jquery interactivity. Then come up with your own project. Necessity is the mother of invention, and you will learn a lot more trying to build something for yourself than by following along replicating someone else’s creation in an online course.

  • Are you thinking of making a game with the ability to talk with outside world in any way? (I.e. multiplayer)

    If so, you might want to learn about networking.

    Other than that, Construct is pretty great out of the box for what you are looking to do. I would certainly recommend it above something like Unity for a top-down pixel art game because of the ease of the learning curve.

  • In Cube Escape, it looks like the background was prerendered 3D, while everything else is 2D. This should be fairly straightforward to recreate in principle. Getting the parallax to feel right will probably take some tweaking though.

    I think suzannegrey hit the nail on the head. Once you get the room background, everything else is just a sprite on top.

  • Thank you! Do you know how I could create a mobile app and how I would export it?

    Unlike Unity3D, Construct is designed around HTML5 technologies, making it really easy to export for the web. Native mobile export is *never* easy, and I have been doing it for six years. There are many resources on line that will walk you through the convoluted processes involved in native mobile publishing, but I strongly recommend getting good at web apps first, which don’t require any extra effort other than uploading your project to a website.

    I recommend starting by creating a project, then putting it on a website somewhere. It should run really well on mobile, and you won’t have to worry about jumping through the hoops required to publish to Apple or Google’s app stores.

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  • With the output from Construct 2/3 it is very easy to change the images (specifically logos). I know it may not seem like a big deal but it is for publishers who want to distribute their games for branding purposes.

    Well, I looked at the HTML5 games (made using various other software as well as Construct 2/3) I have site-locks of and the ones I looked at do have images that are easily replaceable so it seems this an issue with most HTML5 development tools and not just Construct.

    It is a little extra work, but I think you could get around this issue by serving your logos from your own server. Like anything, it isn’t perfect, but it would prevent someone from simply swapping out an image.

  • To be very precise I was using this:

    plugin-html-iframe_t149647

    I assumed that the button element and the iframe behave in the same way which is why I asked for the button at the beginning.

    It is really tough to get html/css to play nice with Construct. A few years back I spent several months working on this, and was able to achieve some success, but in the end I decided it is typically better to reinvent the controls inside the canvas whenever possible. Does everything need to exist in a webpage for SEO reasons?

  • Could you use the Paypal API? It might take a little coding, but it should work.

  • If you don’t need audio, and the file size is small, you can rip each frame of the video to individual png files, then load them as animation frames in a sprite object. You can then create your own buttons to control frame-by-frame playback.

    This won’t work for large videos though.

  • I am currently working in Unity 3D for a 3D game in a 4-person team. My core business is education apps, for which I use both C2 and C3. For my purposes, HTML5 is the most important technology, so Corona would be a huge step backward in terms of usability and deployability. We looked at Corona a years ago, but chose Construct 2 when we realized that we could entirely skip the app store approval process with HTML5.

    In the end, C2 was the best choice for HTML5. After 4 years with C2, I don’t think there would be any benefit to using Unity or Corona for 2D development. I haven’t run into performance issues that I couldn’t solve for mobile, and deployment through something other than a website would be a huge step backward in our target market (schools) - most schools in the US use chrome books, and creating apps that only work on phones would cut out most of our users.