Construct 3 r183

Notes

It's the start of a new beta release cycle and we have lots of exciting changes for you today!

First of all you can now export Android App Bundles right from Construct. App Bundles are a new format for the Google Play store designed to replace APKs. You may have previously seen warnings on Google Play suggesting to use them. APKs still have their uses for development, testing, and you can still publish with them, but Google appear to be encouraging everyone to switch to App Bundles. So now you can! They also have a slightly higher maximum size of 150mb. Read more about Android App Bundles here. There's also a new option to export signed debug APKs which wasn't previously possible and may be useful in some cases for testing.

Another significant change is worker mode is now enabled by default for new projects again. We previously made this the default in r158, but had to revert it due to some problems with it. These problems have now been resolved, so we're pleased to make it the new default once more. This mode hosts the entire runtime in a Web Worker off the main thread, which helps ensure the game continues to work smoothly even if the rest of the browser or web page is busy with other work. It's a major technology upgrade with good performance benefits and has been in the works for a long time so we're excited to see it back as the new default once more!

For some time we've also been experimenting with support for local file & folder saves in Chrome. This experiment has been running for some time and we're increasingly confident it works well. Therefore we are enabling it by default for beta releases only. This means all beta users can use local file & folder saves without having to enable experimental features in Settings. Since the Chrome feature that makes this possible is itself still experimental, and appears to remain so until later this year, we're not yet enabling it for stable releases. So at the next stable release you'll still need to enable experimental features to keep using it. This is to make sure that any changes to the Chrome feature during its experimental phase don't affect stable release users.

Finally there are even more changes, including Animations Editor improvements, lots of bugs fixes, scripting improvements, and compression to help speed up Remote Preview in Chrome 80+. See the release notes for full details, and happy testing!