Overboy's Forum Posts

    In case anyone is interested in getting more context about this, many addon developers voiced their concerns about this change in this thread:

    Thread about why Addon SDK2 is a massive regression in what's achievable with Construct (making it less powerful and less trustworthy, for no valid reason) :

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/scripting-51/method-access-engine-181244

    Construct will remove support for SDK v1 addons. The addons will no longer be loaded in the editor, and projects using them will fail to open

    This post is even more worrying than what we were all thinking in this previous thread, because not only everything will be hidden/made inaccessible on purpose, making the engine 10x less powerful and making many of its limitations impossible to overcome (no matter how skilled you are at eventsheets/JS/AddonDev),

    but it looks like you also plan to break every single addon ever made for C3 (6 years of collective work making the engine way more powerful and being used in thousands of projects) in approximately 1 year, while you always promised that at least the documented features of Addon SDK V1 would be supported forever.

    Here is what you said on the thread I linked above, 2 months ago :

    The exception to all this is the documented, supported APIs. If you use those, we promise to support them indefinitely

    You can of course stick to the documented APIs and do anything you like, and we promise to support that indefinitely

    So are those promises not worth anything anymore ?

  • So, as I said before, we are not actually going to remove all undocumented features in the next release. However we will move forwards with a plan for a v2 SDK over the next year or two, which should give enough time to design a suitable SDK and deal with the inevitable difficult backwards compatibility issues that come up. Let me be clear: we did not have to do this, as we reserved the right to say "tough luck". However as it is clear this is untenable and obviously unpopular, we are promising to do the necessary work to make sure this transition goes smoothly. This does mean designing a new API in co-operation with the addon developer community, and I would hope this ultimately ends up a comprehensive, capable API that does pretty much everything addon developers could reasonably want to do, short of unfettered access to the internal engine. I would ask for co-operation during that process so we can end up with a reliable, robust, maintainable SDK in the long run, and not the risk of disaster that we are constantly running at the moment.

    Ok that's a bit better. (The part I quoted above I mean... in disagreement with everything else as explained in previous messages)

    Still worried about this decision, we're just loosing possibilities with no benefits, we'll depend on the feature request process for everything not knowing if and when we'll be able to fix our issues and overcome the limitations we'll face...

    But I think everyone here is hoping for a cooperation in the transition process, as you plan to remove access anyway. Please let's not make it a Scirra VS C3 users again. You can't just hurt our trust and faith again and again. I think we're hoping to see notable improvements in the communication and the way our feedbacks/concerns are treated.

  • Once again, repeating myself, source code is not an API.

    Yeah i know I just point out that here, you're about to dedicate your limitated ressource and work hard to lock everything for your users and to do the opposite of what your community wants.

    Meanwhile, the creator of Godot, the most promising alternative for your disappointed advanced users (free forever, open-source, enabling total customization, with the most active creators and 3rd party dev community, getting updated at light speed based on actual user issues) is teaching anyone how the internals of this engine is working

    I haven't been talking about obfuscation here, only encapsulation. I am not sure where you got the obfuscation point from

    The obfuscation interrogation comes from several post you wrote in this thread, such as this one which is the first one that worried us.

    > Question: Or is it that there is a plan to obfuscate all internals at some point?

    Answer: This could well happen, and it could mean whatever internals you are accessing become permanently unavailable.

    At least 5 person asked you about it after that to understand concretly what you meant by that and it's still not clear.

    Does encapsulation solve any concerns we raised ? To me encapsulation means the exact same outcome we want to avoid. (and it's likely you would do both Encapsulation AND obfuscation).

    Encapsulation OR obfuscation (or both of them) means we depend on you for anything and makes the engine 10x less powerful for its advanced users, it removes a bunch of control over our own work. Besides that i'm not comfortable knowing that I don't have ownership of my own work, into which I'm putting all my soul.

    > Question: This is probably what you meant, but isn't the best way to deal with it is to FIRST make improvements to the SDK with an active cooperation with 3rd party dev during several months/years and only then starting to progressively encapsulating ? Is it what you're planning to do ? Improvements to SDK first, encapsulation second ?

    Answer: No, because the current SDK is unmaintainable and risks disaster, and the longer it is used, the greater the risk.

    It seems that promise you made a few post ago to do your best to make the transition as smooth as possible didn't last very long. You just want to remove us what makes our projects feasible without even working on a decent solution to mitigate it first ?

    I think this thread has shown, if we say "don't do XYZ, it's unsupported and we won't help you", in the end people do it anyway and then still expect us to help them

    We're not asking for your help, we're asking you to not depend on you to get help and to not obstruct our way to make our games.

    When it comes to 3rd party dev/community initiative and how Scirra reacts to it, what should be an obvious win-win often becomes a lose-lose

  • Anyway a few questions to understand :

    I am talking about encapsulation, not obfuscation.

    So you guarantee the runtime will never be obfuscated like the Editor SDK ? Just better encapsulation but everything will still be readable for us ?

    (Would still make us dependant on the feature request for everything but at the very least we could read the code to get inspired for some stuff)

    We will likely start moving to a better designed SDK in the future, and we will try over the coming months and years (as this will be a very long term project) to make good faith efforts to mitigate

    This is probably what you meant, but isn't the best way to deal with it is to FIRST make improvements to the SDK with an active cooperation with 3rd party dev during several months/years and only then starting to progressively encapsulating ? Is it what you're planning to do ? Improvements to SDK first, encapsulation second ?

    Releasing the feature requests towards better Addon-Making that are currently hibernating on the feature suggestion platform would be a good start to show your good will btw

    Linking a few of them, starting from the most popular on the current platform (some of them are just repost from older suggestions platforms)

    1. Add support in vertex shader to output world position (would unlocks new possibilities for 3D shaders)
    2. Debugger: more granular Behavior and Plugin processing
    3. Missing Editor/Runtime Hierarchy methods to create UI Systems
    4. Allow behaviors to have object type/link/info properties.
    5. Add scripting interfaces for Custom Actions
    6. Effects SDK: down and up-sampling
  • While we are arguing for days why we don't want Construct to be even further black boxed, the creator and technical lead of Godot just started a Youtube series where he explain in details the Engine internals.

    He posted the second episode a few hours ago.

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  • People provided you some solution to fix the main issue that you're raising and that we're trying to understand (basically protecting people from using risky 3rd party addons).

    An other idea to solve this :

    • The addon developer check a simple bool if the addon is considered as "risky".
    • A pop-up warning saying "If you use [insert risky addons names] in your project, it could break your project in a future update and Scirra won't help you to fix the issues related to your 3rd party addons" with a link to a new documentation page explaining everything you explaind here. ( you could list a bunch of potential issues here such as the Android publishing requirements).
    • The warning popup could have a button "make a backup" to let the user save an alternative c3p of his project before opening this.
    • You could pop up that warning each time a project with a risky addon is updated to a newer version, and suggesting to open the last version the project was saved instead (so people could stick to this version)

    This kind of thing would do the trick, there are actually easy solutions to the issue you keep mentionning. It just requires a bit of good will.

    However what you're about to do WILL absolutely create a disaster. It could potentially break all the most advanced projects currently developped using C3 + thousands of more simple projects using 5 years of community work

    It would be throwing off those 5-6 years of collective work, for litteraly no rewards for the community who put so much effort in it.

    As C3 users and a community we know the long dark times Construct went through when it hurted its own powerusers / 3rd party devs with some decisions. At least, the last times there were clear benefits for us in the balance : Construct 2 => Construct 3, worker mode support, but those were still painful trade-offs.

    How should we expect you to create a better Addon SDK (merging it with Scripting API) when we know getting obviously missing Addon SDK and Scripting API from you, related to already existing features is such a painful, time-consuming and hopeless process ?

    Here is just one of the most recent example I personnaly experienced : github.com/Scirra/Construct-bugs/issues/7735

    Skymen also wrote a blog post mentionning that exact issue 2 years ago : construct.net/en/blogs/skymen-13/flexbox-weird-characters-1590

    (If anyone wants to know how bad an obfuscated Runtime would be, the part of the blogpost about the already obfuscated Editor API is insightful btw)

    Also if 3rd party addon dev, relied on Scripting Interfaces, it would be even worse than the current limited Addon SDK in some ways because it would mean that we'll have to develop plugins and behavior TOTALLY differently than the way Scirra is developing vanilla addons.

    Anyway C3 is moving in the opposite direction of Game Engine history here with the rise of Open Tech. (by that i mean having an Open Philosophy not necessarily Open Source)

    A bunch of game engines/frameworks targeting web are growing pretty fast with a similar Open philosophy such as Defold or Phaser.

    Game-maker very recently OPEN-SOURCED their runtime.

    Godot has become the biggest Engine in term of itch releases, social media interaction, exponential growth of commercial releases and is relying on a Open philosophy letting devs customize their experience both at Edit and at Runtime. They probably have the most capable 2D engine and each Godot user has a guarantee to keep the full ownership of their own work indefinitely, no worries about unipersonal decision that could destroy years of work (+100% free, 100% open source). They are also planning to enhance their web exports a lot by providing options to reduce the build size and manage load times efficiently.

    The 3rd party dev communities are big and prolific in all those engines, this is probably one of their biggest and most resilient strength.

    From a gamedev perspective, C3 advantages over its competitor are already narrowing, and this single decision would makes things worse really fast.

  • Hi, are there any videos on YouTube where some examples are shown?

    Hey ! No there isn't! I don't plan to record video for my add-ons at the moment but they come with detailed documentation and examples and I can help people who get them on Discord :)

  • Obfuscating the runtime is not an accidental or unintentional stuff to do. And yes it does matter that it could be avoided easily by not deliberately removing us our guarantee to be able to fix and create features ourself. It would be working against your users who pay you a subscription to enhance the engine, not to waste resources to lock down their own creations. Again, the whole point of this thread.

    You seem to put real effort to not understand or ignore our concerns. All this feels like a big waste of time. Betting on construct long term or even just for making professional projects with it feels like a risky gamble.

    Our experience reporting feedback to you is the same experience you describe reporting feedback to Apple / relying on them for your business.

    The analogy with Apple VS Open Web works well on different aspects. Example : Apple prevent other browser to exist on their platform that would allow healthy alternatives to exist for their 3rd party dev and users. It sounds familiar to me. No roadmap, half-baked features, everything locked on purpose, no action taken on the most requested stuff and deliberate moves to prevent 3rd party dev to create solutions for those themselves, everybody dependant on someone who obviously don't share their interest. Even the bad faith reason given by apple is similar: "security"

  • Again that was the first point of my first message in this thread : we love to know that you can have the flexibility to change any part of the engine to make it better, without needing to support indefinitely undocumented methods, so we should use them with caution etc. Skymen often say he would love if any of his addons could be deprecated in favor of a vanilla solution.

    Totally preventing us from accessing those methods removes us the control to develop our own features and fix the issues/limitations we're facing, it just makes the engine worse. Recently, I find more value in the features built by advanced C3 users for advanced C3 users facing actual issues, and above all the features i built myself for my own private use than in the Vanilla updates. It's like if I was able to develop the engine very fast toward the specific direction i want it to be for my needs.

    Knowing that you plan to remove all this, is actually like as it already happened. It's not a weighted risk on each thing individually, it's a certitude that our experience with C3 will downgrade as whole, that all effort to achieve our game vision are vain and that every tiny thing we need will need to get through the feature request process (rewriting the same feature request every year, praying Scirra push it while it's almost certain it won't - for legitimate OR arbitrary reasons) while before it would just take 5 minutes for us to do it.

    I think perhaps a good way to do this would be to put the addon SDK behind the scripting interfaces used when doing JavaScript coding in Construct.

    The reason we use undocumented features is precisely because builtin features doesn't allow us to do what we want. Scripting API are often even more limited than Eventsheet features, and i know by experience requesting an obvious Scripting API corresponding to existing eventsheet feature can take more than a year to be pushed and even never happen.

    (Also we can already easily use Scripting API in Addons, so it's not as if we were losing something while winning something else... We're just losing possibilities. The opposite is also true, today we can use the full power of the Addon SDK in js scripting easily, soon, we'll only have access to the <1% exposed stuff with all its obvious holes)

    But anyway we already explain this, and as often, you don't seem to acknowledge the point we're raising, denying our experience with the engine and the hard work we're putting into making our games, as if vanilla features were fitting any gamedev need that could ever exist. This is exactly why we don't want to depend on you to fix every single issue we might face.

    This is a Apple vs Open Web situation here, I'm sure you can relate. Yes Apple is a huge company, but that is precisely why we can understand the logic behind their shady moves. Shareholders, dillution of responsibility ect. Here it just feel like a unipersonal decision at the expense of all paying subscribers and C3 users and shows again a lack of empathy and shared goal with the C3 community.

    On top of every drawbacks already mentionned, obfuscating the runtime would make the 3rd party porting solutions to console orders of magnitude harder (if not impossible) to develop. The best solutions are litteraly alternative runtime like Chowdren : construct.net/en/forum/construct-2/general-discussion-17/chowdren-fast-construct-134395

    It would be 100x harder or impossible to develop an alternative runtime without being able to take a look at the vanilla runtime. So it won't be possible to create Playstation or Nintendo Switch porting solutions

    So at the very least 3 of the main drawbacks of C3 are about to become worse

    - Porting to console is incredibly tedious

    - premade blackbox tools might create unsolvable limitations for our games

    - Not enough 3rd party devs empowering and providing value to the community

  • I would point out nothing has changed. That warning has been there for a long time and it has always meant this. If this was not clear to you, I am not sure how to make it any clearer. Do you think the wording should be different? If so, what should it say?

    This whole thread is about it, so it might be worth rereading everyone's comments ? There is a major shift with your recent statements.

    It went from "undocumented features could change or be removed at any time" which is perfectly fine and understandable to "we plan to make sure nobody could ever access and use an undocumented feature".

    There is a full world between an engine that let you customize/extend/create new features at your own risk (like any other game engine let you do) and an engine that don't let you the control over such things.

    Everything vanilla is using undocumented feature, so we can't do anything relevant using documented feature. There were not thought to be used, not battletested, and there is no cooperation with 3rd party devs to make things better.

  • Ok thanks a lot for the clear answer : So it looks like preventing us to access undocumented Runtime features is in your plans. "the sooner, the better"

    To me this is very bad news, it would be a loss for everyone. It will put more expectations on you to fix everybody issues and to integrate the features every single advanced/complex/specific production needs and it makes the engine 10x less powerful for advanced users than it is today.

    Anyone who tried to do anything with the Editor API knows how impossible to do anything relevant with it because how limited it is. This is exactly the same with the documented part of the Runtime API. My experience is that asking Scirra to expose even the tiniest obvious obfuscated method in the Editor API requires an unbelievable amount of time and energy for a very unlikely chance to happen.

    One of the biggest drawback of construct is the lack of being able to customize our Editor experience (extra window/tools at edit-time). And instead of enhancing that aspect, the Runtime is about to fall into the same situation. Making the overall level of control over our own work 10x worse than it is today.

    i don't see how any C3 user could benefit from this, and i don't see how any C3 user wouldn't be impacted negatively by it in some ways

    Even people who don't use addons benefits from :

    • lowering the number of feature the community expect Scirra to develop
    • successful games and active community result in more chance for the engine to grow over the years (+ more tutorial, resources, word of mouth marketing)
    • a bunch of the most interesting features ever released officialy to c3 mainly exists because 3rd party devs like Skymen or RexRainbow made them first (Tweens, JSON, Touch fix/extra features, 3D Shape for the older ones, Dynamic Layers, Follower, CSV to name some of the most recent)
    • knowing community-made solutions to the most annoying limitations exists and are available to download (for free most of the time) at any time. A C3 user might not need a tweak/custom feature now, but what will happen if they're facing a wall at some point in their production ? they will be screwed, no addon dev will be able to help them anymore. I'm not sure anyone like to know any issue they might face would be unsolvable.

    Overall, it really hurts my trust/faith in Construct, and I'll think more carefully about my choice of game engine for upcoming projects. I know by experience that I need to use custom features very often to develop the game i want to make, especially as many vanilla C3 features are super opinionated or because achieving modularity / making logic reusable across project is otherwise impossible.

    But anyway, I appreciate your transparency !

  • Single features changing or even disappearing is something entirely different to obfuscate all internals at some point.

    And that was the question, "is it your plan to obfuscate all internals at some point?"

    That's a big difference in quality and quantity.

    ^ This basically

  • So you can guarantee the Runtime API won't become like the Editor API in the future where only the documented exposed stuff is accessible while the rest is obfuscated and impossible to use ?

    To me what you are saying here isn't clear.

    I think we all know about that warning and that we should use undocumented features with caution.

    The difference here is that you mentioned several times those past months that you would like those undocumented feature to be totally unavailable for us. Which is completely different

  • The only thing we want is to keep being able to access undocumented methods (that all official features relies on including all official Behaviors/Plugins that never changed in 6+ years) at our own risks when we need it. It's nothing like forking/hacking the engine.

    Anyway could you just please answer this simple question so we can plan our projects accordingly : do you plan to obfuscate the whole undocumented runtime and only let us use the documented features ?

    I think it would be fair to give us a clear answer

  • Hey Ashley, I totally understand why you're saying us to not use undocumented internals. It allow C3 to evolve pretty fast without Scirra needing to worry about rewriting some chunk of the runtime. You don't have to support indefinitely every method etc.

    However please, never obfuscate it / make the undocumented runtime unavailable.

    Being able to acces the runtime internals (at our own risk) is essential to allow us to workaround engine limitations or create very specific features we need for our own games and that Scirra couldn't want to implement (for legitimate reason - too specific, would bloat ACE lists, taking too much time to implement, too hard to grasp for beginners).

    For any complex game production no matter the game engine, the gamedev sometimes need to tweak, hack or extend the engine to make something work. I avoid it as much as I can, and I don't plan to release publicly addons making heavy use of it but for my own purpose, i need it very often and making it unaccessible at some point would just make any dev at the mercy of what Scirra has the time/wants to implement. (And most likely very specific issues hapenning on specific game productions aren't Scirra priority)

    I think the current balance is good: Scirra warn us to not use it, but advanced dev knowing what they're doing still can use it for their own purpose instead of spending months/years to beg for missing features that might never happen, or moving to an other engine.

    As Scirra has limited resources/small team and far too many suggestions this is the best balance for 2 reasons : Scirra can rewrite any part of the internal at any time AND If a user REALLY need a specific feature, at least he's able to do it using undocumented features.

    If this become obfuscated, we wouldn't have any ways to implement features ourself, the documented Addon SDK is just far far too limited. (and will always be, because no one knows what will be the very specific/advanced needs of any complex game production)

    I would definitely like to use that throughout our codebase

    Are you really considering to do it ? Your message could let us think that this is actually planned which would be really worrying. Could you give us any guarantee that this will or will not happen ? This kind of thing would have a major impact on my business and mid/long term plans. Imagine if you knew the Construct 3 engine you're developing for 15 years as a whole had a 50% chance to just permantently break with no workaround at any time because major Browsers decided to do so ? This is basically the situation you're putting some of us in with this kind of statement. (in fact it's even worse as we're paying a subscription to fund the development here)

    Some of us are C3 subscribers or customers for 10+ years and i think we desserve to know if such an important change is about to happen. If a game engine moves from "a workaround is likely possible if you really need something" to "no workaround no matter how experienced you are and how hard you try", it's not the same kind of game engine anymore.