I just want to say that as a guy who has made a giant game using C2, I love it and I'm terrified to use it at the same time. I can see in our game where things hitch up. A lot of it looks like behaviors and webGL effects not being as optimized as they could be. Even with the new prototype I'm working on that is still at a very clean and basic stage I'm catching things that I thought were fixed long ago in the engine.
The hitches in our game are so varied between hardware that I am not confident enough to publish another PC game using C2. While I'm having a fantastic time on all of my machines with the game aside of a 7 year old pc. Someone who has a newer pc than mine (I have a new i7 republic of gamers laptop 16gb ram and a 2gb 860m gpu) complains that the frame rate isn't smooth on my game or it crashes or the sound randomly cuts out... I honestly don't know what to tell them. We've done so much trouble shooting and suggesting but so much of this stuff shouldn't be happening. The same bugs don't always have the same solutions. It sucks.
I have someone play testing my current prototype who has a new machine and the prototype just crashes randomly. We can't pin point it. He said the same thing happens with Insanity's Blade... go figure. The prototype is only using a couple of the main webGL fx and behaviors... nothing added extra added. It's just the engine. And I know I haven't done anything kinky with the engine.
Last time I checked one of the recent builds of C2 completely broke Insanity's Blade so we have separate version of C2 running to do our work on either game. We can't test or export IB. It's just borked. So it's at this point that I get pissed when I've paid for a product and it doesn't work and I get shoved aside when I don't upload all of my copyrighted shit and can't recreate the problem in a tiny file with none of the games assets. To me that is a giant "F#ck you, not thank you for buying my product".
But then I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the fact that I can toss my idea into a prototype at close to the speed I can think it up. I can work at it on the fly and that is just amazing to me. The way C2 is laid out from a designers point of view is brilliant. I just flow through everything I do - when it works!
So it's a real love hate relationship. I want to see it *really* get better. I want what I bought to do what it said it would do before it's abandoned. I don't want excuses from anyone - I paid for something because it said it could do something and that's the bottom line.
It feels like the bad relationship that you know you should walk away from because that person just can't clean up their act. But you just can't do it because you see that little glimmer of hope that they can.
Insanity's Blade wouldn't have happened without CC and C2 and that is a fact. It would have take us much longer back then to do it with an engine like Unity. But in my professional game design job, I already use Unity. And it now does things so much more easier than before. And for me, it's not about how much the engine costs. I don't give a shit. It's how well it works, and what it can do for me.
I will hold on to that little glimmer of hope that C2 will break through and be what I expected of it. That's what I want. I don't want to give up on it. I don't want to make a 3d ultra modern epic game to blow everyone's mind. I want to make a simple 2D platformer with some effects and not have it fuck up. That is all.
So as angry as I am at this product, I want it to succeed. Hell, I made a Broforce demo (with awesome gfx) on a lunch break just to show how amazingly simple it was to toss something incredible together in C2. Amazing things can happen with it.
/end lovehaterant