Scoremonger's Forum Posts

  • I think I'm going to have to just make a decision and go with it, so some time in the next few weeks I'll look in to setting up a brand-new suggestions platform to run for 6 months from scratch, probably from June to the end of the year, with limited votes. I'll try to make sure the old one is still accessible but read-only, since that seems better than deleting loads of ideas and discussion, and we might want to be able to reference back to it even after starting over. I know that maybe not everyone will like it, but I think there's a chance it could actually work much better overall. Let's treat it as a bit of an experiment and see how it goes. If everyone really hates it at the end of the 6 month period we can always try something else, we don't have to stick to one approach forever.

    Dang, it's a shame you're forced to limit the quantity of opinion data in order to limit the number of ideas. There are loads of idea management tools out there (not that I know anything about any of them, admittedly), so maybe if this new approach doesn't work it'd be worth checking those out. Anyway, thanks for hearing us out and giving attention to the issue. Much appreciated. Hopefully a reboot will do the trick.

  • > Seems like common courtesy. They did make the suggestions site after all.

    I mean... that's the kind of thing that would make me regret putting up a suggestions site in the first place as a developer. I stand by my stance that this level of community interaction is rather uncommon, rare even, though of course each person's own experiences may perhaps differ elsewhere.

    Totally agree. It's clear they care what the users think and have made strong efforts to engage with us. We aren't being blown off just because they don't reply to every single idea we put on the platform. They obviously want to get a system in place that makes the users feel involved and contribute without overwhelming themselves. It's just a difficult challenge.

    I've worked on a similarly small team that needed to develop software while constantly fielding user feedback, and responding to users while developing a product is an incredible amount of work even when dealing with trivial issues (and we were making simple mobile games, not a game engine and toolset).

  • So a reddit type voting system would be only up to one vote per suggestion, but unlimited suggestions. Would definitely need to be combined with a way to cull low quality/popularity suggestions.

    Right, I don't think literally using reddit would work. But limiting the number of suggestions per user (while allowing one vote per issue per user, ideally) and using popularity as the culling metric seems like it would. Obviously there would necessarily be subjective culling by Scirra's team as well - a wildly popular but impossible to implement idea would still have to be considered "low quality" and rejected at the end of the cycle. But yeah, if sheer volume of ideas is the issue that's preventing the platform from being useful to anyone, forcing users to be more picky about what they suggest seems like a reasonable thing to try. 10 ideas per user might even be too many, but I don't know what the rate for new idea creation actually is over a six month period.

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  • If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So I don't think unlimited votes is a good idea, since you don't actually have to choose what's most important to you, you can just throw votes to everything that might be even slightly useful. I know it might feel like an impossible choice, but I want to make people choose their top requests, so we really focus on what is the absolutely most wanted things. Remember that the votes will be accumulated across hundreds or thousands of users, so one person's votes probably aren't going to influence a decision alone anyway. It's also a measure to prevent inundating us with work. If you can only submit at most 10 ideas, then you can't post a mountain of work that's impossible for us to do.

    Seems like there is a bit of conflation here between limiting the number of ideas that can be created and the number of ideas that can be voted on. Right now it's possible to create ideas and reduce the number of votes on it to zero, which I have done because I'm already out of votes, so I've been confused as to why you seemed to be arguing that limiting votes would somehow limit the number of ideas. Now it makes more sense. I actually don't object much to limiting the number of ideas that each user can create in a six month span, if that's what it takes to keep the volume of ideas manageable.

    That said, I can't see why it would be bad to let everyone cast a single vote towards every idea they like. To your point, we're talking about the weighting generated by hundreds or thousands of users. No one goes through reddit upvoting every single comment, even though they do have that power. In practice, people mostly just vote for the things they find most compelling, and the system works. There is no need to limit the number of votes because the users self-moderate. By limiting the number of votes, you're limiting the ability to determine what the group finds consensus on and making the platform more frustrating to use, which also suppresses engagement (speaking from my own experience, at least.) I agree with the common view that one's personal "pet" ideas consume their votes and therefore their ability to express positive opinions about other, equally useful ideas, and because of that we're likely missing out on points of consensus.

  • Only solution which I can see:

    Better guide, tutorial, manual for scripting or plugin making. Plugin and simple change automation for runtime and editor, which simplfies work enough, so users can do their own version of stuff. Case, which in overall should make scirra work easier too.

    Sometime like:

    *Plugin maker - with set of rules to avoid compatitibility problems. User should be able to modifie simple templates and add features to templates of official plugins. Allows users to do small changes to plugins to add some expression, condition or simple change.

    Yes, I've found writing a plugin for C3 to be more difficult than writing portable components for Unity (using C#) or Unreal (using Blueprint - I don't mess with C++, haha), partly thanks to the somewhat bare-bones SDK documentation and lack of tutorials for writing C3 plugins. Of course, a simple, baseline C3 plugin is just more complicated than a simple, baseline component for other engines, so it's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison. But the bottom line is there's a lot of friction with getting started writing C3 plugins. Having some built-in software to help manage complexity in C3 and some plugin programming tutorials would be pretty great.

    In general, C3 logic isn't too easy to encapsulate and port between projects. It's actually somewhat dangerous to do - if you do your event sheet/object copying and pasting between projects wrong you can wind up with a corrupted project file that can no longer be opened. (I recommend Plastic SCM Cloud for an easy to use, binary-friendly version control system, for what it's worth!)

    Anyway, I digress... there are already suggestions on the ideas platform for ways to address all these issues, but sadly they're mostly buried.

  • If Scirra can't afford to triage the bulk of the ideas on the platform (which is understandable), then yes, please, it would be great to get some official response to the most popular ideas, even if that means shutting some of them down and giving people their votes back so other ideas can be elevated.

    Speaking of voting, a system that allows a single up or down vote per user per idea might be a good way to go, rather than a finite pool of votes per user. This is how Netflix, reddit, Steam reviews, etc. all work, and it seems like a good system. That way everyone can give a bump to any ideas they like without fear of running out of an arbitrary number of points. We wouldn't be able to add additional weight to our pet ideas with a system like that, but I don't get the feeling that having a couple extra points to throw at an idea makes much difference right now, and I personally tend not to spend more than a vote per idea anyway, since there are so many good ideas and so few votes to give away.

    In terms of managing the platform, I was wondering if the external team building the example projects might be able to help with triage of ideas, since they're actually building games with the software and have a working relationship with Scirra. One concern I have is that Scirra doesn't appear to use their own software to make real games. They don't "eat their own dogfood", so to speak, so they may not be feeling the pain points in the product the way some of us do. But since they now have a partner that's constantly using the tool, perhaps they could request some help from that team with prioritizing ideas on the platform?

  • You may have more luck getting a response if you're more specific about what you need help with.

  • Nice, thanks for the links! I'll send those suggestions some votes. Funny, when I wrote this post I was wondering if it might be possible to disable them at runtime as a workaround, and you answered that question too.

  • Does anyone know a way short of editing each tile in a tilemap to change the "Use Collision" property? For bigger tilesets that have a mix of solid/passable tiles, it can be a pretty tedious process. It would be nice to be able to change that in the Tilemap view directly, but I don't see a way to. Is there any other way?

    If not I will suggest it on the ideas platform, but I wanted to check here first, thanks.

    Tagged:

  • Hi, I was wondering if anyone here has experience with GDevelop 5 and can compare it to C3? From what I can see at a glance, it's extremely similar to Construct in its approach, but is generally less polished, less streamlined in its workflow, and has fewer features. However, it does have what looks on paper to be a VERY powerful feature, which is a built-in behavior editor that allows you to define behaviors using mostly (entirely?) event logic. I haven't actually tried that myself yet, so I was curious if anyone here has, and what your impressions are, if so.

    Tagged:

  • OK, naturally as soon as I ask for help, I come up with a workaround. So, if anyone else is doing something similar, hopefully this will be helpful.

    I made a function called SpawnCharacter, which creates instances of characters based on a CharacterType string parameter, and returns either the UID of the new character, or zero if a new character wasn't created. The logic of the function goes like so:

    • Declare a lastSpawnedCharacter_UID local number variable.
    • Pick the last created Character object, and set lastSpawnedCharacter_UID to Character.UID.
    • Create Object (by name) using CharacterType.
    • Pick the last created Character again.
    • Compare the UID of the last created character to the value in lastSpawnedCharacter_UID.
    • If the values are different, return the UID of the last created character.
    • If the values are the same, return 0.

  • Hi, I'm wondering if anyone knows a way to detect when the Create Object (by name) fails to create an object because the string it was passed isn't valid. In most languages, you'd be able to write some logic like, "If this function call returns true, do this, otherwise do that", but I don't think there's a way to get a return value from the built-in system actions. Anyone know if there's something I'm missing? Thanks.

  • I see piranha305 (I think) created a request for a feature to export and import objects/logic, very similar to what I and others were suggesting. That's already on the suggestions platform if anybody cares to throw some votes at it! Link:

    construct3.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C3-I-535

  • >  For example, if you develop something new in an existing project and want to bring it into other existing projects (or put it into a template project like the one you describe), there's still manual recreation involved with getting it ported over.

    True, but that shouldn't be that bad? I mean you copypaste/create all objects you need and then copypaste all events and maybe do some cleanup. Or am I missing something? I mean it probably doesn´t work for all cases so yeah...

    It's not so bad as to totally block one's progress, no. Again, this is not me saying there's no workaround. What I'm saying is this has been a big enough friction point over the years that it's worth asking about the possibility of a better solution. If you don't think you'd ever make use of such a feature, good for you.

  • The best approach is probably to create yourself a base-project that includes everything you regularely use, so you don´t have to copy bits and pieces by hand. Deleting stuff you don´t need is much easier. I also have one setup mainly for the way I handle buttons that require just 3 events all across the project for setup (a combination of 2 plugins)

    Yes, this is a work around I've tried as well, and it can help in some situations, but it has some limitations. For example, if you develop something new in an existing project and want to bring it into other existing projects (or put it into a template project like the one you describe), there's still manual recreation involved with getting it ported over.

    My point is that it's already technically possible to port features from one project to another, but it would be helpful if there was some automation.