Fimbul's Forum Posts

    Fimbul,

    Reported. Your comments are unacceptable. Calling people a liar is not cool.

    Now you're reporting me to moderators because you disagree? You wish to censor my comments? That's what's not cool.

    Also where did I call him a liar? I said specifically that I didn't believe him. And I don't: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a sustained 122 hour workweek is an extraordinary claim that, unless backed up by evidence (and no, your anecdotal "evidences" don't count) simply cannot be lent credibility.

    Let's revise the rules to see which ones I broke:

    • Your fellow members should be treated with respect at all times. I wasn't disrespectful. I specifically avoided insults. I only called into question his claim. In fact, I'm being so respectful that I'm concerned for his health.
    • Disagreements are common, but you should always make an effort to resolve them in a polite manner. Have I not done so? There's a difference between politeness and mindless acceptance.
    • The following activities are prohibited:Flaming Not really applicable. It should be sufficiently clear that my intent isn't to derail the thread or cause drama
    • Personal attacks Attacking claims isn't the same as attacking people. Argumentum ad rem is the opposite of Argumentum ad hominem.
    • The General Rule: Don't be a jerk. This is subjective. I don't see how I'm being a jerk.

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    No. No one consistently works 122 hours a week for years.

    It's not possible unless you twist your definition of "work".

    If you are going to call someone a liar, best have supporting facts to back your accusation. Assumptions count for naught. Best to say nothing.

    Not really, I don't.

    “If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically. In the UK we have the second-longest working hours in the developed world, just behind the States and we now have longer hours than Japan,” Professor Cary Cooper – Lancaster University Management School.

    how about some crazy people?

    "Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 hours on a sustained basis, but it's hard. You have to get down to eating once a day and showering every other day, things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours."

    - Len Bosack, co-founder, Cisco Systems, and hero to the hardcore

    source. Sounds reasonable?

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1430346/Doctor-working-crazy-hours-killed-himself.html

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/doctors-death-fuels-row-on-hours-1369224.html

    turns out working 100 hours a week is really bad. Who knew?

    Even sweatshop workers put in less than 120 hours/week

    working 80-100 hours a week is really bad

    You will suffer a lot of health problems

    Ever heard of the japanese word "karoshi"? It means death by overwork.

    You can work 20 hours a day, but to do so consistently and without weekends is insane.

    "Top execs" work a lot, sure, but they too are human and need sleep. 20hrs/day 365days/yr is unsustainable and I doubt it's even possible.

    Maybe the issue is that I'm thinking "billable hours" (that is, hours you are actually working and could bill a client for them), whereas they could simply mean "hours on the job-place" (that is, hours you spend sitting in front of a computer or in an office), where you'd get something like 30~60% productivity. If you discount lunch breaks and commute time, and you work from home, the hours become intertwined with "waking hours", which are suddenly a lot more believable.

    Fimbul I could care less what you believe. he asked i responded. Your welcome to ask my wife. An its right at 18 hrs a day and that include sales, marketing, developing, finances, etc.

    So you work 18hrs every day, no weekends, with only 6 hours of sleep per day, not counting commute time?

    Also, you stated that you spend 75 hours per week developing with construct 2, which is more work than everyone else in the thread spends with their full-time jobs. You also said you're the CEO and work with sales, marketing, developing, finances (which you presumably do in the remaining 47hrs of the week). You also have a wife (so either you spend zero time with her, you don't need to sleep, or she works with you).

    If you truly do work these hours, stop. This is unhealthy. You're [literally] killing yourself.

    Have a job yes: 122ish hrs wk

    Occupation: CEO/Lead Developer

    Average Time Spent developing in a week: approx 75hrs

    You work almost 20hrs per day? I'm sorry I don't believe you.

    Anyway here's my stats:

    Have a day job: yes 10hrs/day

    Occupation: (many)

    Average time spent developing in a week: ~2

  • Aphrodite and newt: I don't think you guys get the issue:

    He is accessing properties of an object that exists, but has no instances at the time of the referencing.

    think of it like this:

    • <There are zero balls>
    • Make all balls be blue
    • Create a ball
    • Ball unexpectedly comes out white

    He was writing to the phantom "default instance" and expecting newly spawned instances to be created with whatever properties he set to be the default. This behavior would make sense, think of it as changing the defaults of an object.

    However, construct doesn't work that way. You cannot "write" default properties at runtime. Thus, you get a logic error that is hard to spot.

    I don't consider this a "bug" per se, but Ashley might want to do something about this. Either make it so that you can write defaults, or make construct give an error if the object you're writing to has no instances (I think this last approach would be very hard to implement).

  • Edittime extensibility is not at all supported in C2. If we rebuilt the editor, we would make extensibility of the editor one of the focuses of the project.

    I'd love for you to go into detail about the features you imagine for an eventual rebuilt editor, even if you can't promise anything.

  • 2) Directional Light. I would like a light to mimic light from the sun, so that all shadows go in the same direction.

    I'm not 100% positive that this will work, but I think that if you place the light really really (really) far away, you'll get something like a directional light.

  • Aphrodite, I suggested "events sheets for the objects themselves rather than the layouts" yesterday as well! the way Unity2D handles it is pretty awesome!

    But I was told I could just have a separate event sheet for each sprite with its own logic. Still I think it could be cool.

    The problem with attaching eventsheets to sprites is that sprites begin to perform mysterious alterations to other parts of the program, in an anti-pattern known as action at a distance. If something weird happens, you might spend hours staring at layout-attached eventsheets only to find out later that an unused/obsolete object was causing the issues.

    A much better approach would be modularity, where you create self-contained widgets (including inheritance) that do what you want them to do, using construct logic. This is practically the same as making construct be object-oriented instead of procedural (the way it currently is now).

  • So yeah, all for Construct 3 with a fresh IDE. I don't mind the wait and will happily pay for a new license (provided C2 projects can migrate over to it).

    Considering the project files are currently XMLs, if construct 3 maintains an open architecture with XML or JSON, I might be able to make a converter myself.

  • "Namespaces" sounds too much like proper namespaces, which I guess is a worthwhile feature in it's own right.

    Variable grouping, however, is purely cosmetic, and wouldn't affect the way variables work at all.

  • If, as Ashley states, it could potentially take up to a year to recode the IDE with virtually no updates to C2, this looks like commercial suicide to me.

    • Most current feature requests, besides modularity, are for editor improvements (In fact, you can even make a solid argument that modularity is actually and IDE feature instead of a runtime one).
    • A multiplatform localized editor has potential to bring in a lot of money.
    • The new asset store would bring in a ton of revenue if people could mod the IDE. Remember scirra takes a 30% cut.
    • Scirra is very lean, and a construct 3 MVP would only take a few months to reach market. The thing that would take more than 1 year would be feature parity with c2, but we can tolerate that since we'd be paying for early access. We've done it once before with the move from CC to C2, we can do it again. It's not like scirra is ripping us off, anyone who knows even a tiny bit of c2 can make the money back easily.
    • I don't mean to be rude, so please don't take this the wrong way, but IMHO ultimately it's not our place as a community to evaluate the business viability of an idea, just to express demand (or lack thereof) for it. Let Scirra be the judge of what risks they should and shouldn't take. I'd hate for people to vote against an idea just because it might not be viable technically/commercially.

  • DuckfaceNinja, I had a lot of trouble understanding your post, tell me if I've got this right:

    • If C3 is ever going to happen, you'd rather it be a 3D engine
    • However, you are against C3
    • Because you think scirra would need to expand in order to keep C2 and C3 supported simultaneously before C3 matures enough that C2 can be retired

    is that it?

    If so, lets take this in parts:

    making C3 (if it is going to happen at all) a 3D (and 2D) game engine, as easy to use as C2

    Well Ashley has already posted his views on the subject before. Even though I'd love to see a 3D construct as well, I don't think browsers are ready for it. Maybe in 2 or 3 years.

    I believe you're already working at your max capacity

    I agree, but switching to an HTML5 based IDE would mean less work in the long run, not more (since it would all be javascript instead of javascript & C++).

    There's also the problem that hiring new developers to work on ongoing projects tends to make projects take longer.

    I don't see the practicality moving on to another runtime framework

    You misunderstand. There will be no new runtime framework. We're talking about a new editor only, the HTML5 runtime engine will remain the same.

    Out of curiosity, where do I find your to do list? It might be helpful to the community if you sticky the list, so that we are kept informed with what's coming and going on.

    Officially, there is no public todo list, but in practice, it's pretty easy to find it

  • I've not seen any web UI frameworks that in my estimation compare to what we use at the moment.

    I'm not sure I understood what you mean. The web is miles ahead of the desktop in terms of styling and widgets. There's no desktop equivalent for CSS, and although there are many desktop UI widgets, they're hard to integrate if they come from different sources, and none of them are as extensible as their javascript-based counterparts.

    The only reason we don't have a browser-based photoshop or zBrush is performance, not features, and the C2 IDE is mostly static, so such concerns should be no issue (especially since javascript text-based IDEs are feasible, as proven by brackets).

    Whatever we did, a radical technology shift or reworking of the editor (at least to support Mac + Linux) would take a considerable amount of time, pushing things back a long way while we catch up with what the editor already has. (We're too deeply tied in to Windows and MFC at the moment for it to be practical to port what we have already.)

    There are already tradeoffs with continuing the C++ editor, and those will only get worse with time. We are already hitting a ceiling on what the editor can do in terms of modularity and extensibility - I'm sure you agree an IDE SDK is just as much a pipe-dream than a HTML5 IDE.

    Linux+Mac support are two other things that would take a ridiculous amount of time.

    The longer we wait with the current editor, the worse the cost becomes. Besides, we've been sitting on the bleeding edge for a long time, it will be nice to let the wrappers/browsers/devices catch up a bit and get better organization features, which are currently preventing big projects from becoming a thing with construct.

    Skinning was a major feature that ended up limited to recoloring/resizing only (imagine the power of CSS based reskinning).Translation practically flopped. There are many widely-used translation APIs for javascript, and they're mostly plug-and-play.

    To what extent are those wanting editor enhancements willing to wait for this to happen?

    I'd rather see modularity first, before a huge push for IDE enhancements, but after that I don't think there are many major runtime features left (the biggest one was multiplayer and that's already in).

    We could keep extending the C++ editor, which is relatively painful, and further invests ourselves in a Windows-only English-only editor.

    I don't think you're too fond of that idea yourself. The mac+linux versions might be incentive enough for you to port, and those would probably represent an extra 15% of the total income (though I imagine Tom would have a better idea).

    A translated editor would also go a long way towards acquiring new customers, so I thing it's a good idea from a business sense.

    Or we could think about reworking the editor sooner rather than later, which in the long term could bring a lot of wishlist features but would probably be on the order of at least a year or more, during which updates to the current editor and runtime would probably be sparse. And we'd probably call that "Construct 3" given the vast scale and cost of the reworking.

    We've done it before with the move from Construct Classic to Construct 2, and that took time but I think it paid off amazingly well.

    IMHO those make sense both from a business and engineering perspectives. For me at least it's clear the engine has outgrown the IDE.

    This time around we could keep the same runtime which makes it less work. Thoughts?

    You'd also keep the exporter, the XML project structure, the runtime debugger and the runtime SDK, as well as most of the eventing scheme (one could call it the "construct standard library"). Extensions would be easy to convert if you keep the runtime SDK. You could also make a tool to convert c2 projects to c3 projects.

    As for construct 2, I've been extremely satisfied with it, and I think I got more than my money's worth out of it. I'm not sure anyone in the community can disagree, especially considering the free (and frequent) updates we've been getting all this time.

    I'm in favor of a Construct 3. Why don't you post a poll discussing it?

  • Variable grouping would serve the same purpose, you could hide the non-configurable variables under an "internal" group or something like that. That also has the benefit of allowing you to configure variables in a sane way for other use-cases, such as my other post and followup

    currently my solution is to name them _varname