TackerTacker's Forum Posts

  • It's literally just this meme at this point.

    From both sides.

  • I can't imagine the SDK ever being flexible enough to allow addon devs to provide solutions like e.g. changing the FOV, because if Scirra puts the time into it they might as well simply add that feature themselves.

    Or the ability to control the sampling mode and fullscreen scaling quality on a per layer basis. So many times I wanted to have a small scale render for automatic pixel perfect visuals and low cost for effects but also needed a high quality HD render for readable text.

    There will never be an SDK flexible enough to providing these things that can't be worked around with other means and that Scirra would never add themselves if I made a feature request for it.

    I'm not great at art and for me it opens up a whole host of projects that I put on ice because I wasn't able to use that art style without readable text in game and for menus.

    If they obfuscate all internals, those (and future) solutions to my problems are simply gone, Scirra wont provide them, SDK wont fix it.

    And for what, for the possibility that it might stop working in the future?

    I rather have a period where a hacky feature is working than it never being available for me at all.

    Every commercial game eventually sticks to one C3 + exporter version combo anyways, and that's not just a C3 thing Unity, Godot, Unreal, every game developer does this.

  • 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.

  • If I'm missing a small feature or some ACE in an addon from Overboy I know I can contact him and he will most likely add it if it is possible and it's done the next day, sometimes within an hour. Or he lets me know that it isn't possible and I can move on trying to find a different solution.

    If I am missing a feature or ACE in an official addon (I'm screwed) I make a feature requests, it gets deleted after a year, I make it again on the new platform, wait another year, etc. etc., sometimes I give up, sometimes it gets added after 3-7 Years.

    You can't argue with how things work in other engines when this is the state of your engine. Look at how stressed you were dealing with Apple, this is the same for us, this is cutting us off from our last resort to be able to fix our own issues because WE KNOW FOR A FACT that Scirra wont.

  • IMO it's actually more important for C3 than new features. But I'm probably pretty alone with that opinion. Just a round of exposing more ACE from existing plugins and behaviors would improve C3 so much already.

  • I'm currently working on a game where you craft rockets, and I have to jump through a lot of hoops to make this somehow work in C3.

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    If the Tilemap plugin would be able to rotate this would make it sooo much easier for me to make this game, but more importantly it would allow me to do so much more fun things in the game too. Right now, after the player drew their rocket with tiles, I need to paste the tilemap into a drawing canvas, then run a marching square algorithm, that R0J0hound wrote in JS, over the pixels to detect the edges and create a collision shape via a distorted mesh.

    I could avoid all this if the Tilemap plugin was able to rotate, and I would still maintain the ability to change the tilemap unlike with the pasted image of it.

    This is also not the first time I ran into this, wishing it was possible. I wanted to make an RTS once where you build your own tanks out of tiles, but I had to drop the idea because of this limitation. I can easily think of many more examples, like a space game where you can upgrade your spaceship by installing new rooms and modules, or a construction game where you construct buildings, but if you don't add enough supports, pieces can break off. Etc. etc.

    I bet you have many idea for a games that would be possible, or way easier to do with rotatable tilemaps yourself.

    You can also not work around this limitation easily (or at all depending on your requirements).

    If I wanted to recreate the tilemap with sprites and combine them via hierarchy I would not be able to assign one physics behavior to all objects, and if I apply physics to all of them it would become a nightmare of unstable physics or they would not interact as if they are one connected object. Joints do not work for this either because there is no weld joint where everything would acts as one.

    Creating your own collision shape is also only possible in this very hacky way of using deformed meshes, and we do not have access to the collision polygon points so you can't just try to only take the outer points from the collision polys you already have, you need to use approximation algorithms like marching square to recreate new collision shapes from scratch.

    The 9-Patch and Tiled Background plugin already got rotation added and they became so much more useful and versatile because of it. I know that the implementation of angles for the Tilemap plugin is quite a bit more difficult than these two, but the increase in versatility this would bring is immense and would open up so many possibilities for the C3 community. I hope this improvement to the Tilemap plugin is considered by Scirra.

    I added a suggestion on the suggestion platform https://construct23.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C23-I-522, but I don't have high hopes for many votes.

    The problem is that feature improvement suggestions often die on there simply because it's not a shiny new toy.

    Tagged:

  • If it is by Aekiro as you claim Everade why was it posted on github.com/aekiro2 and not github.com/aekiro ?

  • I added a way to change the collision cell size

    YES! Wohoooo, that's great news, love it.

  • I have a general question about performance.

    Ashley if we want to help by making performance benchmark projects, where would we send them?

    Should we open a GitHub issue and add "performance" in the title, or should we post it here on the forum, or send a mail?

  • I agree with a lot of the things Ruskul is saying. Especially this part:

    [...] and part of wanting to work with events is that they feel cleaner, more visual, to me, and the moment I can't, it just feels like the core advantage of c3 is no longer present and other environments offer cleaner code spaces.

    There is only a single thing that basically everyone in the community can agree on, and that is that the event sheet system is awesome.

    My concerns with the whole JS/TS focus lately is that there is no end to it, from now on it will always take a good chunk of resources away from improving the experience of using event sheets. Resources that we are told over and over again are very limited, and I get that, but I disagree with the allocation of those resources.

    Entirely new product no one asked for, "Dogfooding" C3 with C&C but actually using Construct more like a framework, or even just as a renderer and doing everything else in JS (though tbf some of the best improvements to old plugin/behaviors actually came from this. But obviously only to the parts that were actually used and not circumvented with JS), C++, JS, now TS, ... where is this going? What is the plan? Is there a plan?

    We get multiple new things exposed to the api every single update, but if you want some more ACE exposed for events sheets, from an old plugin or behavior, it's always a year/s long battle.

    Another concern, and something that is already happening, is that it's splitting the community, where parts of it now literally speak a different language. It would be something different if it's only people who extend the functionality for all by creating new addons, but it's not. It's split in a way that it's more and more expected to use JS to fix your issue, even though you don't use it yourself.

    If you say you don't want to use it you get told to try it, it's not that hard, or something like that. I did try it, but coming from GDScript, it's an awful coding experience in comparison and literally the polar opposite of what makes Construct great and why I use it.

  • It would be nice if Scirra talked to users about things they are planning to add/are working on/thinking about adding early on.

    Right now it's always, SURPRISE we added this new feature to address the thing everyone asked for, and sometimes it's really great, sometimes it's only okay, and then sometimes it missed the point completely, or is half baked. You never know.

    But you always know that this is what you get now, no matter if you like it or not. You might get some changes through or a small addition during Beta, if you are around and have time to test, but the basic way the problem is solved or not solved will not change, and any hope for a different solution is now forever completely out the window.

    So much unnecessary work could be avoided IMO if users would be consulted earlier in the design process, I'm fairly certain that many things could be scrapped before even a single line of code is written because it's simply something no one actually needs. That extra time could be spend on making features more complete by talking to the people who actually use the engine.

    This doesn't have to be something completely open in the public if there is a fear of discussing features that might never actually arrive, but maybe specific people like R0J0hound, Overboy, skymen, Mikal, etc. could be involved in giving their thoughts and early feedback before production even starts (If they would be willing to spend some of their time on this).

    Setup some NDA that they are not allowed to talk about it, or what ever it takes to get the people who, in the end, have to actually use these features, involved in the conceptualization and development process.

    Right now it can sometimes feels a bit like damage control when a feature is released that has missed the mark.

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  • [...] how about a periodic Scirra organized C3 game jam. Every X month Scirra holds a Construct 3 weekend game jam where C3 is free to use for that weekend and the 1st price is a C3 license.

    Just in case Scirra is considering this option, please simply use itch.io to host the jam https://itch.io/jams instead of doing your own thing on Construct.net or something. Itch is where the devs are looking for jams, that's how we get new talented people taking a look at Construct.

  • I completely agree, obviously the business needs to be sustainable but their is also a wiiiide range to play with between small Scirra <--> gigantic Unity. I don't think anyone expects things on the scale of Unity or Unreal from Scirra.

    I had another idea after thinking about it some more, maybe as a less drastic change, while hopefully still getting some of the benefits an unrestricted free version would IMO have, how about a periodic Scirra organized C3 game jam. Every X month Scirra holds a Construct 3 weekend game jam where C3 is free to use for that weekend and the 1st price is a C3 license.

    It still doesn't fix all the issues of a crippled demo vs unrestricted free version I personally see, but it could help eliminate the biggest pain points.

  • In terms of ideas for marketing I could see Construct having the motto:

    Work smarter, not harder

    Oohh or

    Work faster, not harder

    On the front page it would show something like:

    Here is what you would need to do in other engines to do X (Not naming a specific engine because no one likes bullies)

    and then showing how much faster and easier it is in Construct. Actually it should first show how fast and easy it is with Construct to do X and then show the other engine comparison, feels more confident this way around.

    This messaging would still say, hey we are beginner friendly, without pushing the no coding part too hard. It's less about a feature bullet point and more focused on what that feature actually does for you.

  • I don't understand it either.

    A free version doesn't cost Scirra much, but brings in lots of value, even free users help Scirra big time.

    Free users make the community bigger, a big community in itself is a valuable "feature" people look for when picking an engine, a bigger community creates more advertising for Construct, not only because it's bigger now, but because people can actually fully use it ...you could make a YouTube tutorial video about Construct 3 right now, and people can use it, but you always have to stay in the limited test version restrictions if you want to actually share it with the audience, so it results in only shallow tutorials because more in depth videos don't get many views. You can't say, hey let's use Construct 3 in this game jam, because everyone needs a sub otherwise you constantly run into limits. Even if you make that work, it's not fun and makes the first experience with Construct3 for these people annoying. People will be more relaxed about the subscription model because now they aren't forced to pay to get rid of annoying artificial limits, now they pay to gain access to additional services. There are so many more good reasons for it like more potential addon creators, free users simply getting used to the tool and thus preferring it, increasing the chance of becoming customers, YouTubers like Gamefromscratch would actually cover Construct, etc. etc.

    It obviously needs a strategy how to turn free users into paying customers, but I think Construct is already well equipped for that. There are many features that actually make sense to put behind a paywall, you should only be able to exporting to the Scirra Arcade with the free version. Remote preview should be possible in the free version but only a very limited amount of times to show what you miss out on. Maybe Scirra offers its own cloud service, and free users can only save in the cloud with up to xMB available space, paid can save where they want and get a bit of cloud storage with their sub, as well as all the export options, the cloud build and minification service. So basically charging for services and convenience.

    So I'm not advocating for an (mostly) unrestricted free version because I don't want to pay, I advocate for it because I don't want Construct to lose against GDevelop, I don't want to be the next Clickteam Fusion in a couple years.

    But I obviously can only judge this from the outside, I genuinely think it would be the right move, but I recognize that I don't have access to any data about subscriber counts, if they go up or down, Scirra's financial situation, their burn rate etc. and speculating about the right strategy is easy when it's not your company on the line.