PKrawczynski's Forum Posts

  • Long-time fan of your work! What's on the agenda for 2017 and beyond?

    A lot is going on actually for everyone involved. Personally I'm working on improving my older games with some extra polish thats always welcome as I want them to stay relevant for years to come - as far as I know others in studio are considering doing the same. Past 6 months I was working exclusively on deckbuilder game for steam with — It will continue on this year and is coming up nicely after few iterations on prototype, but I want to throw in some extra time to create few more small games this year too as a way to blow off some "steam" and just have fun with smaller concepts.

  • > Does it mean every dev is on their own with q/a process from steam when there are hiccups like this where we use construct2 tool to make game for hundreds of hours and then we get stuck because there is needed some general knowledge that goes beyond creating game logic but goes deeper in territory of handling installers?

    >

    > Would you consider helping us out? I'm very glad dev did manage to figure this out but it doesn't help me or others at all.

    >

    AFAIK the problem in that thread was to do with Steam uninstall scripts, which I have zero experience with (C2 doesn't use one in the Steam build), so I'm just not actually a helpful person in that situation. It would be better to get in touch with Valve's support. Yes, you may need to learn and use some other technologies to publish your game, I think that is pretty reasonable.

    Thank you for honesty - it means a lot to me. Yes It is reasonable - to expect that there will be some bumps and knowledge will have to be acquired.

    Just wished originally for some tutorials and documentation thats all. Gladly I found some devs that were willing to talk and share their insight into process and it looks like it was just blown out of proportion in that thread. I could probably write that script and get everything working in a day with config panels that are available.

    Cheers.

  • > Ashley

    > Isn't free edition limited to 100 events?

    >

    Yes, and there are other limitations too besides that.

    [quote:2mua8fzy]Could you help out with issue that was brought up here with nwjs and steam:

    Which, specifically? The thread is mainly about writing a cleanup script for Steam, which doesn't seem to be that specific to NW.js, and AFAIK was resolved by the developer. There's also no reason to think Electron would be different in that regard.

    I respect your opinion and decisions. I was just curious without any hideous agenda or trying to spread vitrol. Thank you for explaining.

    However...

    Does it mean every dev is on their own with q/a process from steam when there are hiccups like this where we use construct2 tool to make game for hundreds of hours and then we get stuck because there is needed some general knowledge that goes beyond creating game logic but goes deeper in territory of handling installers?

    Would you consider helping us out? I'm very glad dev did manage to figure this out but it doesn't help me or others at all. I also understand this is entirely nwjs problem and its not your responsibility to do this but some people invest massive amount of time in their games (because they prefer construct2 to other tools and thats great compliment!) and its disheartening to be left on your own with no guarantee that you might figure this out yourself or be lucky enough to find someone that will help out.

    I won't drag this topic further but would greatly appreciate if you could give definite answer what we an expect.

    Best Regards.

  • > So, are you saying that Scirra won't allow armaldio to publish the Electron plugin? Or I misunderstood something?

    >

    Why would we allow people to advertise ways to circumvent the free edition restrictions? That breaks our whole business model.

    Ashley

    Isn't free edition limited to 100 events?

    NW.js is regularly updated and AFAIK is robust enough for several games to have been published to Steam with it.

    Could you help out with issue that was brought up here with nwjs and steam:

    I'm pretty far in my project and I'd love if you could tell how to handle those issues that were brought up in that thread.

    I got interested in electron personally because I assumed I won't have problems mentioned in that thread I've linked. I'm not yet sure how to create installer, what to put in that .bat file and how to link dxwebsetup on top of everything so there would be one neat installer/uninstaller for game handling everything thats required by steam. There are blog posts on Scirra about games that are on steam - but there are no clear instructions to people how to actually prepare properly installer.

    There aren't that many steam developers but I'd say they are pushing limits and showing world what can be done with C2, when you are focused on creating something grander.

  • I know C2 is in "maintenance" mode and C3 is actively developed, hence this should be very simple feature (should be, but might not be as it turns out at times) - basically copy paste ctrl+f that would work little differently and make life immensely easier for some people.

    Hey Ashley I've run some idea through people I know that work on c2 for slightly larger or larger projects than average and it would be much appreciated if along "search" (which acts like a filter but its okay) we could get jump to/go to line in editor mode. Flow could be:

    1. Press shortcut (anything but lets assume ctrl+w)

    2. Input gets autofocused on text box where you can type like in ctrl+f search box on top of screen.

    3. You type ex. "1337"

    4. Editor scrolls to line 1137 and its in middle/top/bottom of screen

    5. User jumps in chair and claps his hand in amazement

    6. ????

    7. Profit.

    Obviously we can do something similiar but much time consuming with combination of current ctrl+f, find line among all filtered lines, press ctrl+f2, press escape, press f2 and you jump to line - but for large project with over 1k and especially 2-3k lines in single event sheet (yes this is how its easiest for me to work) it's actually just spaghetti.

    For people that support the idea but don't really want to dwelve on it too much, please just type +1 so post gains visibility.

    For others that dont care, it's okay with you let this post die in limbo but please dont go all "we dont need this" when you mean "you" dont need it. Kthxbai

    Peace.

    We possibly did announce C3 too soon. (...)

    b) explain why Construct 2 development might be slowing down somewhat.

    However for the reasons I posted earlier we never felt like it was a good idea to announce anything further.

    (...)

    We have actually been working on further hiring and are still looking in to some expansion - we just haven't made announcements yet. But Scirra has been bigger than just Tom and I for a while now.

    Ashley

    Thank you for announcing C3, I was on edge deciding between C2 and Unity for my larger game project and knowing that there will be backward compatibility between current and next tools version was enough to convince me to try harder and get better with C2***. Overall knowing that You and Team have been fine and are working on improving tools is amazing news.

    Once again thanks for improving tools as currently imo C2 is just best for html5 web games development and with node webkit people were able to create some cool desktop games too

    All in all after 2 years I'm glad I've picked C2 and it allowed me to create many games . However long it may take I will patiently and loyally wait for C3 so yeah...

    Thanks Team Construct

    ***

    I was salty in past because of how html5 gets buggy on browsers, especially bloody ios safari made my life shorter by few years most certainly. Coming from coding background (as3/c#) I was also kinda annoyed by how picking instances is working (aka needs to create block of code dedicated to picking via uid or other means) but now I understand it's because c2 with some advanced features could be extremely confusing to newbies and could even turn people off with complexity, gladly plugin system exists and rexrainbow in those 2 years created some amazing QOL coder features. Anyway I can't stress enough even how great C2 without plugins is to create simple/medium sized html5 games, with plugins probably sky is the limit.

  • This is not yet implemented, but is on the todo list.

    Awesome, could you think about option to remove unused variables on objects or in event sheets?

    I'm working on a larger project and since I cant easily track if there are any references to those variables its sometimes hard to clean up project to easier work on it.

  • PKrawczynski - why does preloading music matter? Is it important if music starts playing a moment later or in the first touch?

    Ashley

    Preloading matters because music cant be streamed as clients will report that music sounds jittery on older devices or when connection is very bad. Preloading did solve those issues for them and reports stopped coming except occasional "music takes long time to start playing" but it was fairly easy to explain that its ios fault - as you said, it can be played only after first touch.

    Sadly streamed music does not cut it for spil, booster media, and many others. Flash like quality experience is kinda target for html5 games (in mobile browser, im not talking about apps) right now, long gone are times where games could go away with no music and sfx.

    What they would be MOST happy with, is if game didnt start until all the assets AND music would load, all the while displaying progress bar with percentage text how much total of both is already loaded, and only after both are loaded player is pushed to main game screen. Which probably as we both know is pretty terrible idea because loading music can take a lot of additional time, and there is no guarantee ever some browser/device combination wont have broken audio api or whatever, shit happens with html5 if i may say so.

    Personally I'm happy enough with these workaround for time being, maybe Apple at some point will change their policy to audio in browser like they finally are catching up with fullscreen issues, webgl and accelerated js in non stock safari wrappers. It would be still kinda neat to have working preloading in newer c2 versions along way to tell how much of music has loaded as there is no variable to access that

    Anyway Ashley I would like to say construct2 is really great tool i've evaluated couple of them in past months and tried but so far nothing beats how easy is it to create small-medium games, so kudos for that to you. Small issues like this with sound are to be expected and they are understandable.

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  • > Put your music files in sounds folder and you are good to go.

    >

    You really should not do that. It will cause extremely high memory usage, and sounds are not coded to ever release their memory, so the more music tracks you play, the higher your memory usage goes. A single decompressed track could be 40mb+, so most devices will only have enough free memory to play two or three music tracks.

    Ashley

    I'm well aware.

    I play only one music track per game, and since preloading is broken on ios thats my only option.

  • Dont use preload, its broken on iOS and Ashley says its intended.

    Do what I did right now. Put your music files in sounds folder and you are good to go. Even if someone have extremely crappy internet connection they wont hear jittery playback.

  • Problem Description

    Audio never loads on ios7.1

    Previous version of c2 I was using (148) never had this issue (audio did preload on ios7.1) thats why I experienced this with my project.

    Ive created extremely simple capx.

    I tried from preview over wifi and from ftp server. Exactly the same results each time.

    Audio loads on desktop chrome without issues but it never loads on ios7.1

    Attach a Capx

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/392 ... rking.capx

    Description of Capx

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/f5ef15ri81gdd ... .37.49.png

    Steps to Reproduce Bug

    • Load game on ios7.1
    • Observe how text field never changes its displayed text from "audio is preloading" and music never starts

    Observed Result

    Music doesnt preload and never starts to play

    Expected Result

    Music preloads and starts to play

    Affected Browsers

    • iOS 7.1 Safari

    Construct 2 Version ID

    173

  • —

    Unfortunately it crashes even before ludei logo now

    Reinstalled game from scratch as well.

    I still think its internal cocoon fault but hey, we dont have much choices right now anyway.

  • —

    Wow thats pretty nice, it had been quite a bit of work. Im really waiting for iOS version because its inspiring to play other construct2 games on mobiles. Always gives me that extra energy to continue on my own larger project

    It took you 3 months? Thats probably first post on your blog about that game.

    We used 1.4.7 for all our games on googleplay store and ios - works fine except if game is too large it will crash on ios4 (but that device is like lowest possibly target for anything, it wont be relevant once apple announces iphone6, they wont even have ios8 with webgl for that phone). Havent tried crosswalk or phonegap yet.

  • PKrawczynski

    I can't blame CocoonJS for this because the entire loading into memory is only ~150MB (which isn't huge, I had a 460MB game running on a 1GB ram device!). If your resolution is too low below the 1280 x 720p threshold, the game isn't playable. It's just the way I've designed it. I've put that as a requirement in my Store description.

    It really is meant for 720p + devices. Now, if it was crashing on your Tab 3 8 Inch with 1280 x 800 screen, then I would be very worried.

    —

    How do you deliberately make game crash on sub 720p devices in construct? Its impossible. Even if you set some specific game resolution construct2 would rescale it to smaller size. You are not understanding what Im really saying. I can assure you if you had website with game I could load it and play without any issues. Thats exactly the case and you should be aware that cocoon isnt really great for medium to large games.

    Besides that - could you maybe write a bit how long game took you to make, how large project is in terms of assets and event sheets lines? How much it takes on disk Usual things that are interesting to other developers.

  • —

    1. If your game have problems to work on 1gb device its obviously cocoonjs fault. My games that crash on cocoon on ios work perfectly fine in web browser. Thats because cocoon is very poor for larger games.

    2. Havent modified android, its all stock.

    Look this tablet can handle a lot with webgl, I hardly think your game would crash it due to performance of construct. In worst case I would still get 30 fps if it wasnt for terrible memory in cocoon.

    Im not blaming you or something, dont take it personally. Just tried to let you know that it doesnt work on very popular mid tablet. Samsung tab 2 and 3 have extremely high adoption rate because its just very cheap (i paid like 200$ for it).