Construct 3 r370

Notes

We're excited to launch the first iteration of a major new feature in this release which we're calling Flowcharts!

Have you ever wished there was a visual way to arrange information like conversation trees, quests, and state machines? This feature is designed for precisely that. With the new Flowchart view you can create a series of nodes to represent things like stages in a conversation, with connections describing the possible flows through the nodes. Then you can use the new Flowchart controller object to manage the state of the flowchart, such as which the current node is. It's analogous to how you can create timelines in the editor then use Timeline Controller to manage timelines at runtime. See the new Quest flowcharts example for a demonstration of this, using flowcharts to represent conversation trees and possible quests in a text adventure format.

One important thing to note is that flowcharts are a data structure. In some other tools a similar approach is sometimes used for implementing logic. However Construct's existing event sheets feature already covers logic, and we feel that is more appropriate for that than the flowchart approach. So instead Construct's flowcharts are essentially a better data representation for information like conversation trees, which can be awkward to fit in to event sheets or other data files like JSON. We think flowcharts will prove a valuable addition to Construct for that role, and you can still dynamically control them from event sheets using the Flowchart Controller object.

This is the first release of a major new feature and we know there's still work to be done on usability, bug fixes, and improvements. However we're releasing it early to start getting your feedback sooner rather than later. We're interested to hear what you think of it and what changes you'd like to see!

There's lots more in this release, including some other new additions, and a range of changes and bug fixes, which you can find in the changelog below. Happy testing!