Fengist's Forum Posts

  • Fengist you don't need to export the game, just run the C2 preview and copy/paste the preview url " " to screenfly.

    I'm not sure what voodoo they use to access my local network but... ok.

    If you are using chrome, then there's a nice little extension . Been using it for over a year now and it works flawlessly.

    Thanks, this does seem to work too. Only thing I don't like about it, you don't get a physical size representation, only a pixel by pixel. But for a quick test, it'll do.

  • This thread does not sound encouraging to some one who's still considering purchasing C2. I've read all the posts and seems like the 'experiences' have ranged from minor frustration to keyboard smashing aggravation.

    Kazaa seems to have found several sources of income from Construct (which is encouraging) but 3 things struck me.

    • Since you claim that's your first month, that's impressive. But I suspect you've spent many months getting to that point. Nobody is going to write a book on Construct in their first month.
    • For those of us just diving into Construct, I seriously doubt we'll be raking in $1400+ a month off of clients.
    • Re-skinning a game is more about art, creativity and a good paint program. I also notice you plan to create an online course and have written a second book and you create templates. It seems to me the niche you've dove into isn't publishing with Construct, but rather making money off those who want to publish with Construct (which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

    I've also looked at what C2 apps on Flippa sell for and if what I saw was an example of what people pay, I have to ask, did you spend more than 20 hours re-skinning those apps? Because if you did, I make as much money per hour driving a school bus.

    I realize that making money with Construct is a lot like those get rich quick ads you see on late night television, "your experience may vary". And I also realize that creating a profitable app is not something everyone is going to do right out of the gate (artistic skills drawing a big line in the sand). But if I'm going to shell out $129.00 (which will still buy half a cart of groceries or 2 tanks of gas) and then, fork over 10% of my first $5,000 (which I seriously won't mind doing should I get to that point), I'm not really encouraged reading about spending a month creating a game and another month getting it published, or worse... having to pay someone to help you get published or worse... having to buy a plugin just to get published because the ones with Construct don't work... or even WORSE, $500.00 to remove a splash screen because your choices for getting published are THAT limited? Seriously?

    I understand the point of this thread is to convince Ashley that Construct needs to be a start-to-finish solution. Here's what I'm convinced of:

    • The speed at which I'm able to learn Construct and create working apps/games is amazing.
    • The experiences I've read about in this thread totally negate #1.

    I honestly can't see spending the money if I'd end up like one response: One game published but 5 sitting on the hard drive because publishing is such a pain in the ass.

    Conclusion - The lack of an in-built exporter is the single biggest weakness of Construct 2 and I can absolutely see how it could be a complete show-stopper for new developers trying to build their game using C2.

    Thanks for your honesty. Until I learn a lot more... the show has stopped.

  • Dunno if you'll see this LittleStain but here's a tool I found invaluable for testing these values

    quirktools.com/screenfly

  • So I've been testing the ability to do a dynamic layout, automatically adjusting itself between portrait and landscape and making everything resize properly. One snag I ran into, I only have one mobile phone. I searched the forums for this and didn't find anything so, here's a resource I found that does work with C2.

    quirktools.com/screenfly

    You'll need a url to upload your HTML5 export to, but once you do, I can verify this tool works. I created a test project and using Screenfly, it properly reported WindowWidth and WindowHeight for every 'device' and tablet size it had listed. More importantly, my app was also able to get accurate Viewport information. As the Screenfly device size changed, the Viewport readings changed. And it continued to report accurately when the Screenfly screen was rotated (essential information if you want to keep things centered)

  • AH HAH! Thank you! I may have read one of your posts earlier about using this technique. I was looking at what happened when I ADDED the bottom and top. I didn't even think about subtracting the top from the bottom to get the size. DUH!

    Once I did that, to set the size, it properly resized everything in both the desktop and the mobile and it resized properly when I rotated the mobile.

    Now, I can make an app that works both in landscape and portrait!

  • Ok, I've been doing some testing on how to make a flexible app (not a game).

    First, I set the project into crop mode. Then I created a sprite and position and resize it based on viewport and window sizes. From there, I can 'arrange' the objects on it and have everything automatically rearrange itself depending on whether the mobile device is rotated vertically or horizontally.

    For example:

    I use ViewportLeft(0)+20 and ViewportTop(0)+20 to set the x,y coordinates for the location of the sprite.

    I then do WindowWidth-40 and WindowHeight-40 to set the height and width of the sprite. Then I position my controls on top of that sprite and position them based on it's size and position.

    On a desktop, when I resize the browser (works on Chrome, Edge and IE) and reset the layout, it works perfectly. The sprite stays perfectly centered and perfectly sized.

    However, when I test this on an Android Chrome or the stupid Samsung Browser, the x,y are correct but the sprite height and width are too large. I'm thinking this has to do with the fact that these browsers are reporting their full size and not the size of the actual browser window (i.e. they're adding in the URL bar to their height).

    So here's my question. When I decide to deploy, go full screen and get rid of that URL bar, should this size properly?

  • rgb(random(255), random(255), random(255))

    But, that just sets the canvas to a random solid color.

    This is just a guess, but one solution might be to create a grey gradient background in a paint program and then, to get random color you can add an 'effect' like 'color' to the sprite and randomize it's parameter. I haven't experimented with it though.

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  • I agree Usman. I'm liking it so far. While waiting for opinions on this thread I'm testing out browser scaling on my android. As I mentioned, one of my big concerns (which was somewhat alleviated by an earlier reply) is that what I'm seeing as easy now will become much more difficult once I purchase C2 and try to deploy what I've created.

  • I checked the FAQ and this wasn't in there and I searched the forum but didn't see any obvious answers so:

    Trying to think ahead, does anyone have a working method by which an app/game created with C2 can automatically update itself when a new version is released or is this handled by the big guys (Google Play, etc.) I know the Browser plugin has an update event but this seems to only apply when the app/game being run in a browser.

  • Thanks for the opinions Eisenhaus. At the moment, I only have one project in mind that I need to create. It's an standalone app version of a piece of shareware I have. While there are some limitations, I've already done some extreme testing and I'm confident that HTML5 will work for my purposes (I turned a 65 million pixel object into a bullet). So that's not an issue.

    As far as keeping up with plugins... I'll just say I wished people who write code were just as good at writing documentation for their code. But yea, I'm only too familiar with googling 'fixes' and 'updates' to API's and plugins, but that's an expected aggravation.

    Once I get that first project out the door then I may turn to other things, like games, and then I may run into HTML5 limitations. But I've been programming for over 30 years (I started with Pascal on a PDP 11/70 with 4mb ram) and if there's one axiom in programming I've learned: when you run into a language limitation you either a. find a way to fake it or b. do without it.

  • 4: What do you mean by "aggravation factor"?

    Thanks for you opinion glerikud. One of my fears, since I can't test it in the free version, was that getting apps out the door and onto Google Play, Facebook, etc. was going to be something akin to a nightmare. I'm reading all sorts of scary wordings that require plugins or other programs with inherent bugs just to get published. While I do program in several languages, java is not one of them. I've been concerned after browsing the forums that I was going to have to start debugging someone else's code (which I loathe doing) in order to get published.

    And I suppose that relates to the aggravation factor as well. Recently I've been working with Unity and scripting in C# (modding for another game) and while I've been at it for several months, trying to comprehend some of the really obscure ways Unity works is... well... aggravating (like a quaternion and vector math and the Unity API in general not to mention it's mind boggling interface.) So I guess my ultimate question here is: from creating a new project to seeing the first $1 come in, how many times am I going to facedesk?

  • While my experience with C2 is extremely limited I can say this. One of my first experiments was creating a 5,148 element array (72x72), filling that array with random numbers (1-5), reading back that array and assigning sprites to the background based on the random number, refilling the array with random numbers and then using a different sprite to create a parallax background and... it was fast.

    Arrays are old programming structures. They've been around for years so the code to work with any array in any language is pretty well optimized. But, with any programming, it depends on how large the array is, how often you access it and whether you're reading through the entire array or accessing one cell.

    The problem you're going to have with an array is defining the size of the array at the start and then tracking which cells you've updated and what to do when you reach the end of the array (I don't think C2 has dynamic arrays where you can change the size, I may be wrong)

  • This thought keeps gnawing at me...can I build a business this way? Too often in these forums the answer is "use cranberry's plugin". I commend Sang Ki Kwon for the work he has done, but should I build a game/app that depends on a 1-man company who develops plugins in his spare time? I am relatively new to this aspect of the build process, but I am finding this part of the process much more difficult than the actual building of the game. (Example: I was trying to get the admob plugin working and now the game is locked in portrait mode even though every setting in the game and XDK is set to landscape. I cannot get it in landscape mode. haha) Not trying to sound like the voice of doom, but I really think C2/3 needs to make the process to iOS and Android builds a singular path for its customers. Until then, I just cannot see this as a tool you can use to build a mobile game business. (I feel obligated to say I love C2 as a game-making tool!)

    Currently sitting on the fence trying to decide if I should purchase Construct 2 and like you, considering building a 1-man business around it, I think you just answered one of my major questions. It would appear that building an app with Construct 2 is the easy part. Getting it out the door seems to be an exhausting aggravation.

  • First of all, let me say that I'm finding Construct 2 to be pretty amazing. Even with the free version I've developed an app in a matter of days that would have taken me months in the other programming languages I know. Secondly, the help and support on the forums has been great. Within hours of posting, I'm getting my problems fixed.

    But now, the time has come to make a decision. I've reached the 100 event limit and have to decide if it's time to purchase or look elsewhere. So here's the questions in my head that I don't have answers for and maybe you can help me decide.

    1. I'm looking to make apps, not necessarily games. And I'm finding that pretty easy going. So, the question is, how easy is it to take a Construct 2 app and port it over to say Android and iOS. I have no experience with that and looking at things like XDK confuse me.

    2. I understand Construct 3 is in the works. If I purchase now, am I going to have to purchase again when 3 comes out. I've got shafted before buying an IDE and a month later a new version came out with gobs of new features and I got no free upgrade. *Edit* I just found the post where it said there would be a discount to upgrade but it was from back in January. So I'm wondering now if the 'long way off' for Construct 3 is still a long way off.

    3. I understand some publishers refuse apps made with Construct. While I don't at present plan on going through them, it would be nice to know if I get hard up for cash that I can create a game quickly and sell it. Is it common for publishers to refuse Construct apps and why? Is their reasoning something I need to be aware of when independently releasing my own apps?

    4. Doing my homework, I've looked at a few other app IDE's like GDevelop. While it's amazingly similar to Construct, I like the workflow in Construct much better. It makes sense. But, the price tag of GDevelop is much more appealing. I've also looked at some of the negative reviews of Construct to see where the 'aggravation' factor comes in. My question therefore is, from those of you who have been using Construct for some time, rate the amount of aggravation you experience with Construct and if you can, compare that to other IDE's.

    Those are the questions right off the top of my head. I'll probably have more.

  • That works, thanks but it seems to me that it should have the drag & drop plugin on the textbox before it sets it as a target, which is what it's appearing to do. And I just discovered that listboxes are affected by this as well.

    Anyway, thanks to the support for the two bugs I have reported, I'm ready to purchase... When does it go on sale next? Ok, not a good place for that question. Nevermind.