Construct 3 r252

Notes

It's the start of a new beta release cycle, and we have a lot new for you today!

First up is you can now adjust the vanishing point used for 3D features in Layout Properties. This lets you change the perspective to suit your game or art style. For example it's useful to move the vanishing point upwards a bit in a platformer type game, since it gives a better view of the platforms the player is standing on (and the updated '3D platforms' example now does this). Alternatively moving the vanishing point to the bottom of the screen means tall 3D shapes move up the screen, which can for example allow a clearer view of building faces in a town. Note that somewhat confusingly, this option does not actually change the camera angle, and all 2D content at any Z elevation remains flat regardless of the vanishing point. It essentially just changes what direction the Z axis points in. Anyway you can try adjusting this property in the Layout View and immediately see its effect, so give it a go!

Other new features include a new Z elevation property for layers in the editor - previously this was controllable at runtime, but now you can set up Z elevation for entire layers in the editor, creating a true 3D alternative to parallax. There's also more support for importing animations from zip files and folders in the Animations Editor - try dragging and dropping a zip or folder to the Animations or Frames pane for a convenient way to get lots of files in to your project. The Tilemap bar also has now options to toggle tile collision polygons all at once. Finally after a long while Android apps now support worker mode, which could help improve performance and framerate smoothness. Note that for compatibility reasons, if worker mode is Auto, it is disabled if your project uses any third-party addons. You can set worker mode to Yes to make sure it is enabled if you want to test your app with it.

Finally, in order to keep Construct moving forwards and help our team work quickly and efficiently, the time has come to remove some old and deprecated features. This includes removing support for the legacy C2 runtime. You can still import both Construct 2 projects (.capx) and Construct 3 projects that formerly used the C2 runtime: both will now just use the C3 runtime in Construct 3. However if there are old third-party addons that prevent you using the C3 runtime, you may be unable to import your project from this release onwards. You can work around this by replacing or removing the old addons, which you might want to use r251 for since it is the last release that included the C2 runtime, and then it should import to the latest release again. We have also removed the deprecated Windows UWP exporters and associated plugins, as those have been deprecated since March, had very little usage in Construct, and Microsoft dropped support for them since Visual Studio 2019. This should all help make sure that we can stay productive even with our small team, and keep improving Construct even further, focusing on modern features that lots of users care about.