Beta versions are not as thoroughly tested as stable

Beta versions are not as thoroughly tested as stable

Beta branch

Construct 3 r174

Event sheet animations; new framerate mode property; improved theme performance; lots of bug fixes

04 November, 2019 ()

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Notes

This release adds support for expand/collapse animations in the Event Sheet View (providing the browser supports it and UI animations is enabled in settings). This is just a bit of polish that helps visualise what's changing when you expand or collapse a group or a set of sub-events. Other refinements in this release include further adjustments to ensure good performance in the light/dark editor themes, a fix for a long-standing issue handling behavior triggers, and adding control over the exact Android version code on export. As ever there's a batch of other bug fixes too.

There's also a new Framerate mode property in the Advanced section of Project Properties. Normally Construct ticks the engine and draws a frame every time the display refreshes (i.e. V-synced rendering). There are now two new possible modes:

• Unlimited (ticks only): ticks the engine as fast as possible, but still only draws a frame every time the display refreshes. This helps with measuring CPU performance, such as seeing fast your events can run.

• Unlimited (full frames), which both ticks the engine and draws a frame as fast as possible (although new frames will still only visually appear when the display refreshes). This helps with measuring the performance of the full engine, doing everything it would normally do every frame but as fast as possible.

Both modes are useful for performance testing, and also testing your game is correctly designed to handle delta-time and framerate independence, since it forces a different framerate.

These modes normally drive the system resources to their maximum, and will cause maximum battery drain on mobile devices, so you should only use these for testing and not publish your game with them. (Accordingly a warning will be shown if you try to export with these settings.) However they should be interesting extra options for testing purposes.

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26
Launch r174

New Additions

14 favourites
Event sheet view: expand/collapse animations for events
19 favourites
'Framerate mode' project property, allowing uncapped framerate
8 favourites
New 'Camera average color' scripting example
7 favourites
Android export: option to edit version code on export

Changes

5 favourites
Warning on export if the project version would result in an unexpected version code

Bug Fixes

6 favourites
Behavior triggers ignored the specific behavior
7 favourites
Timelines & Tweens: now supports savegames
2 favourites
Timeline bar: crash when using the search bar in the pick property dialog
4 favourites
Timeline bar: crash using the main menu option to toggle the timeline bar on and off
4 favourites
Animations Editor: fix rounding errors converting between RGB and HSL color spaces
6 favourites
Animations Editor: resizing aligned center could result in a blurry image
4 favourites
Animations Editor: prevent clicks taking place on menus from affecting elements below them (regression in r173)
4 favourites
Tilemap Bar: possible crash when the toolbar becomes inactive
6 favourites
Audio: 'Seek to' and 'Set playback rate' actions may not have worked immediately after a 'Play' action
6 favourites
Memory leak repeatedly saving state (C2 runtime only)
3 favourites
Firefox: crash when dragging keyframes/time markers in Timeline Bar
4 favourites
Edge: possible crash using image rectangle select tool or while scrolling event sheet (regression in r173)

Performance Improvements

13 favourites
Improve editor performance showing/closing dialogs in light & dark themes

SDK updates

5 favourites
Change 'color2' to be an allowed shader uniform since some effects appear to already use it

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  • Amazing feature!

    It shows how fast "worker mode" too, based on an FPS test.

    DOM: 22315 FPS

    Worker: 42599 FPS

    Near 2x the frame count per second. That's great!

    Hopefully this is a gateway feature for capping the framerate. Higher or Lower than 60 FPS.

    Would be very beneficial for mobile development, most especially for weak CPU devices.

      • [-] [+]
      • 4
      • Ashley's avatar
      • Ashley
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 4 points
      • *
      • (1 child)

      Results like this are not meaningful. I'd caution you from trying to conclude anything from such results.

      If you calculate the difference in the frame time in each case, the difference is only 22 microseconds. This is about 0.1% of the 16ms frame time at a normal 60 FPS, i.e. it makes no difference at all. When the frame time is very small it's easy to measure tiny variations such as this which appear to make a big difference to the framerate, but in actual fact have no relevance to the performance of games at all.

  • Oh man, I never expected to get framerate modes back from the CC days. I found them especially helpful for exposing certain race conditions. Also loving the editor improvements as of late! Keep it up, guys!

  • Thank you, the Framerate mode will be a very useful tool.

  • IOS Mobile-IAP = inApp purchases dont work on live Appstore. Since beta.

  • I get always an error while trying to build on r174. anyone got a fix ?

  • Thank you so much for the frame rate mode! But won't it be more helpful than just for testing?

    I feel like games that rely on heavy computation, that may have lagged when capped at 60 fps, now have more breathing room if the target computer has the resources. Computations such as calculating AI, complicated physics (ex: Liquidfun plugin by Colludium), or heavy use of the drawing canvas.

    Maybe it won't be good for mobile battery life, but for PC games this new mode will allow for much more complex games to be accomplished.

      • [-] [+]
      • 3
      • Ashley's avatar
      • Ashley
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 3 points
      • (2 children)

      No, it's not suitable for that. It doesn't give you any extra "breathing room", since you still have the same computing resources available. For example if your game is already slowing down to 30 FPS due to heavy processing, changing the framerate mode won't affect that, it'll still run at 30 FPS. Besides, even if you do want to do something like multiple passes of AI in one tick, you can do that in events already with a "repeat" event, so you only repeat that particular aspect of the game logic that needs it, rather than wastefully repeating the entire logic of the game.

      • Hmm ok then. What does each mode do then?

        For V-synced, if the frame runs in less than 16ms, for example 10ms, will the OS process just sleep for 6ms?

        Then for Unlimited mode the OS process will just never sleep? It will just immediately start the next frame after the first one is finished?

        I'm very curious now. Any explanation will be very helpful! Thanks!

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