Jayjay's Forum Posts

  • in the form of a side-scrolling 2D platformer

    2D platformers seems to be the weakest point of C2, especially if making a game where the enemies are also using platforming behaviors and if there are many (eg: 5+) enemies alive at a time/on screen. Eats up the JavaScript performance and leads to missing collisions on average or lesser machines (which feels like a large portion of audiences who purchase 2D games on the desktop/Steam).

    Also, screen capture software still tends to wreak total havoc in the games, causing further missed collisions and engine issues you won't easily avoid, so social spread of the game might be negatively impacted.

    But as a side project? I agree with glerikud that it should work alright on desktop aside from the above (Windows specifically, never had much luck with Mac/Linux for our game).

    Something like Sprite Lamp effect as an behavior sounds good? As a 2D tool, texture is not Our priority, but making it easy to implement could be very nice.

    Think about creating a player or enemy sprite and then setting the Sprite Lamp behavior, opening a new window where you're able to place at least 4 shadow textures, also, being affected by any source of light and making its shadow and depth visual like the original Sprite Lamp did.

    Sprite Lamp is cool, it gives manual control over each light direction, but I like Sprite Dlight myself since it auto-generates the normal map to be lit up: http://www.2deegameart.com/p/sprite-dlight.html

    But yeah, some simple hook to open up another "tool" or plugin, like Photoshop filters, would be really cool.

  • Hmm, could also be graphics card related.

    Working fine from here though!

    Specs:

    Windows 10 Education 64bit

    1920x1080p 60hz dual monitors

    Intel i7 6700k

    NVIDIA GTX 1070

    16GB Ram

    My comparison was about having many reviews -> sold well -> richer -> can hire more people(?)

    I guess it's not that simple.

    I think it would be almost working like that if the paid version was the only version that can get a review, but reviews aren't worth much to a commercial game dev if it's all the freebies saying "I suck at making games so i just play the templates. but there fun enough! (and its free)." (literally just saw that )

    Irony is in Steam, Construct 2 is way famous than Clickteam Fusion 2.5.

    Look at how many reviews were counted.

    Hard to say that's a valid comparison though, Construct 2 is the first commercial entry from Scirra, and most users got Steam keys alongside their license (Early Adopters did at least). Meanwhile, Fusion customers (being a long-time product) might mostly have had it or their previous engines before Fusion 2.5 was released on Steam (eg: MMF 2 was released in 2006, and the difference between MMF 2 and Fusion 2.5 isn't enough for a company doing well to upgrade and/or leave a review)

    Although this doesn't mean anything as well: despite the larger number of reviews for C2, the actual review "rating" on average is slightly higher for Fusion 2.5 (C2 at 89% https://steamspy.com/app/227240 vs. Fusion 2.5 at 90% https://steamspy.com/app/248170), and that's the C2 any version (free and paid) versus just the paid Fusion 2.5 reviews.

    Comparisons like that don't necessarily mean one is better than the other, I can't really think of an easy way to compare. C2 is new to the game so judging by popular games being created in one or the other is an unfair comparison too. In about 10 years if we still see Fusion games getting famous on popular YouTube Let's Plays (eg: Five Nights At Freddy's) and not so much the C2 games, then maybe we could worry about Fusion becoming a better tool, but I switched from the old Clickteam products because Scirra makes the way-better interface.

    Of what we *do* know, Construct 3 is almost entirely an editor-only change (eg: Windows + Mac + Linux editor, better support for third party plugins to have their own interfaces, which will be great for Quazi's Q3D plugin to become almost an entire engine of its own, but also means more work for third parties to actually get to that level of plugin quality).

    However, as a commercial game developer, I am most concerned about how the game runs for my customers, and so these updates don't really mean anything useful yet to me. Really looking forward to seeing if C3 will get a secondary HTML5 runtime using Vulkan and ASM.js type stuff!

  • newt a plugin for that would be really handy actually!

  • — ah yeah, we didn't do as well as we hoped due to many issues we had with Node-Webkit/NW.JS (losing Mac OSX and Linux support meant a lot of my friends and classmates were unable to play, let alone WiiU which we still get asked about all the time).

    HTML5 has not been so kind to us

    Well, I could change the comparison: most Unity devs write in C#, a garbage collected managed language. C++ may well be faster, closer to the metal, and smoother since there is no GC. Generally though, the difference doesn't matter, the higher-level managed language is good enough and the increased productivity is more important.

    Except it does make a difference, people switch from Unity (C#) to Unreal Engine 4 (C++) to take advantage of that speed boost too.

    But the difference between good C# and C++ is admittedly less than the difference between JavaScript and C#

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  • What more can we do? What is your best-case scenario here? Do you expect me to disassemble a screen recorder and fix it from the assembly code or something?

    It is certainly an issue with NW.JS and Chromiums multiple instancing and possibly even due to not using DirectX or OpenGL which would be easy to pick up on and assume to be game content.

    However what I really ask for here is for an official request made by Scirra to these troublesome third parties that Construct users can then join in on. Make it official instead of sending us as guerrilla agents individually.

    It feels like your support end-point or hand-off is the editor itself, so there is no consideration for the actual game exports and troubles we have there beyond the editor-side.

    This is not enough because your entire program is sold on the backs of these third parties, and so we need some extra help from Scirra making sure they play fair with Construct.

  • The defenses used here are equally valid if Construct 2 was a tool using Adobe Flash "Everything is a third party software!"

    However, in regards to a screen recording issue, it is a known issue that Chromium and NW.JS create many instances to run a single page (which is hidden by NW.JS as a "native app" through wrapper). This is an issue inherent in the specific choices of HTML5 and its wrapping options based on Chromium.

    If Flash was chosen as the basis of Construct 2 would there really be such an accepting response to "But it's not my fault the browsers are all killing Flash!" ???

    Native has, is, and will continue to be a standard of all platforms, because you need native to run the emulators/interpreters/browsers/Flash plugins.

    The design phrase "Less is more" was never more clear than when I look at the "many options" I have to export my C2 games to and none of them work for my entire customer base on Steam, let alone the other platforms our game was planned to come out for.

    So yes, the fact that so many screen recorders don't work with Construct 2 NW.JS exports is an issue that Scirra must be concerned with in some form.

    Scirra may be unable to fix it themselves at all, but to be concerned and using its large(r) industry standing/PR power and fanbase as leverage to apply pressure to the NW.JS staff to apply pressure to Chromium developers (officially as a company, not just "C2 users individually requesting"), is what Scirra's paying customers would expect from the developer of the product they purchased. If Unity or Unreal Engine 4 was doing half the things Construct 2 is doing to me you can bet I would be in their forums complaining too.

    Edit: Also any NW.JS verison from the "most stable" 0.10.x to the newer post-NodeWebkit-rename are equally wreaking havoc on my game in different ways. Not a viable solution, especially when Steam Greenworks breaks in some way at every change too.

  • Perhaps a better comparison would be the dependence on third parties such as Nwjs, is pretty much the same as the dependance of a game developer on third parties such as Youtubers.

    It's actually very serious if your game can't get played by YouTubers, because then a developer gets a smaller audience, which in turn gets less good attention towards Construct 2, possibly even some bad attention because YouTubers who do get the game to run are not afraid of complaining how hard it was to record (and glitches caused by recording).

    It's actually very very very serious if people can't get your game to run when countless other games with the exact same hardware requirements work fine for them.

    It's actually even more seriously Construct 2's concern when their "Create Games EASILY" tool is only capable of just that: "Creating games" but not letting people actually play them on the platforms they promise.

    I know the solution is pretty much "wait for another third party and/or this third party to fix its things based on another third (fourth?) party", but these canary-in-the-coal-mine posts and threads should really influence the next steps that Construct takes. Competitors are offering native + HTML5 and even if their HTML5 implementation isn't the best, they have native exports to really make up for that.

    Saying Scirra is a small company, so they can't make a serious export, is a chicken-and-egg situation. Scirra will stay small until people can make serious projects, and therefore they will be in a perpetual loop of small projects and limited export options.

    HTML 5 on my gaming PC (GTX 1070, i7 6700k, SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM) may work pretty decently, but the Construct Classic games still run smoother thanks to DirectX and native (and focusing on NVIDIA, as we often hear about all the driver bugs of AMD regardless of what game/engine/tech is trying to run on it).

    Vulkan looks very promising, but that's still too new to actually have a customer base of current consumers on low to mid-level hardware (the perfect audience for 2D games).

    I've literally received negative responses because my games don't work on Windows XP, let alone Mac OSX and Linux (too large for nw.js I guess?).

    Everyone who has a perfectly valid complaint, based upon complaints from their actual customers, gets rewarded with the same condescending posts here "Oh you just coded this badly", or "Oh you can't expect that much from a company that literally did a fine native tool as free and open source when working part-time as students", while ignoring that there are many competitive tools out there that C2 developers have to switch to (or already are switching to) if and when they want proper mobile and console support.

    Is this a tool for beginners or advanced developers? Web or PC/Console/Mobile ?

    As an educational tool I love to recommend Construct 2, but for anything beyond a simple web game I painfully have to suggest tools that put more blockades between the artist and an interactive game, because they actually work.

    And that's why, "recording gameplay issue" is a serious concern of Construct 2 and Construct 3 and Scirra. Because it all stems from their promise of a tool for professional game developers, yet ends up turning into something that is preventing actual playable/marketable/viral YouTube Let's Playing games.

    Professionals don't have enough time to invest in every tool, they don't have time to port to every engine when they realize this one doesn't meet their needs. So Construct 2 becomes stuck in this strange identity crisis, and echo chamber, where the real life results (games on Steam, games on Console, sales of games and ratings) don't stack up to the games made in the less pleasant-to-use engines that export native.

    Not being able to record your screen is almost a death sentence to an indie game trying to get recognition.

    Edit: Also, before the "But professionals have used Construct 2 to make things, even you with your game on Steam"-type arguments, a professional can use many different tools to achieve great results with varying levels of pain and suffering (see: Unbelievably Realistic Microsoft Paint Art videos scattered across YouTube).

    That a professional can do some very specific great games in Construct 2 therefore does not mean that Construct 2 is actually/currently a professional tool for making games, especially without proper console export and industry adoption. The major devs of C2 games all ended up hiring someone (or re-writing from scratch in-house in other engines) to port to consoles, even WiiU in some cases due to poor performance/missing WebGL support.

  • On the good: Event groups are a good way to optimize code (enabling/disabling them)

    On the bad: WiiU doesn't support WebGL

  • Wow, great job mercuryus ! Very fun

  • Although I presently agree, especially with Joannesalfa 's comment (for anything professional/a real full-sized game/a console game), HTML5 will only get better!

    HTML5 won't be a massive performance drain once everyone is running the equivalent specs of an Xbox Scorpio (or Xbox One for mobile), and given the way technology evolves that's probably coming in a couple years.

    Until then, C2 is still awesome for prototyping, web games, and small mobile / PC games. Even some WiiU games if your game is kept pretty casual (puzzle games?).

    Then if there's success you can always go the route of other big C2 games and port it:

    Super Ubi Land https://community.unity.com/t5/Non-comm ... -p/1242879

    The Next Penelope http://nintendoeverything.com/blitworks ... ii-u-port/

    Or, if you don't want to hire a coder/do code, there's a few other options that export native while using the "click and drag" code style like C2 does.