Beta versions are not as thoroughly tested as stable
GPU profiling, new theme, optimisations and more
24 August, 2017 ()
Email Me New Releases
Don't miss out on the latest and greatest new features in Construct 3
Notes
For our 50th Construct 3 release it's a big one! Here's a summary of everything that's in this build. Note you can now also 'favourite' changelog items on the left to show you like them!
New 'Light' theme: the counterpart to the Dark theme, we now have a new theme for people who prefer a light style UI.
GPU profiling: this build introduces a new GPUUtilisation expression, which is the GPU equivalent of the existing CPUUtilisation expression. This provides a useful approximiation of how busy the GPU is as a percentage, i.e. how much rendering work is being done. This is an important new performance measurement since previously there was no direct way to determine how busy the GPU was. Since it's important, we've also added it to the debugger, Remote Preview's stats, and the Tech Demo examples. Note that not all devices can report this information; it requires WebGL, but not all devices that support WebGL can report GPU usage. Also note that this is based on hardware measurements on the GPU: if you have poor performance it's not because of Construct 2, HTML5, browsers or JavaScript; it means your game is too intensive on rendering, and the result would be the same in any other framework with the same rendering approach.
In addition to that we've done several optimisations in this build. Iain has done lots of great work on the Opus decoder (used when the browser doesn't have built-in support for Opus), and it's now much faster and more reliable, and can use WebAssembly for even faster decoding where supported. Large projects should be faster to open now, and general rendering performance in the Layout View should be improved. Finally we've come up with an entirely new rendering approach for Tilemaps, which is far faster. Previously tilemaps would have to keep switching textures as it rendered times, but now it can render an entire tilemap with no texture switches at all. This currently only affects the editor, but we will port the new approach over to the Construct 3 runtime, when we come to that.
Finally as ever there's a batch of bug fixes and some changes. We're also currently working on the Construct 3 manual and hope to have it ready soon!
Like this Release?
Let us know with a thumbs up!
Launch r50
New Features
New 'Light' theme, the counterpart to the 'Dark' theme.
New GPUUtilisation expression for basic GPU profiling
New Additions
GPU usage percentage to debugger performance summary
GPU usage percentage to remote preview client statistics
Added GPU usage display to all examples in 'Tech demos'
Render the collision polygon of the tile the pointer is hovering over in the Tilemap Bar
More options to the context menu of the Tilemap Bar
Make instance blink in the layout view when double clicking the corresponding item in the Z-Order Bar
Do not show the Expressions Dictionary by default if it doesn't fit in the screen without overlapping the Parameters Dialog
Changes
For consistency with C3 terminology, deprecated the OriginalWindowWidth and OriginalWindowHeight expressions, and replaced them with OriginalViewportWidth and OriginalViewportHeight
Make "stretch" the default option when resizing images
Download tilemaps to a single ZIP file containing the TMX and corresponding image files
Bug Fixes
Expressions Dictionary Crash when opening it and closing rapidly
Some areas of an image are sometimes not drawable in the image editor
Image editor mobile UI becomes unresponsive after closing the dialog using the back button
Support fractional values for image point positions in the image editor
Undo after editing the graphics of a single tile and closing the image editor
Show subset in Z-Order Bar when opening it from a context menu in the layout view
Bookmarks before the first numbered event show up as "Close to event -1" in the Bookmarks Bar
Release temporary image created to edit a single tile of a Tilemap source image
Performance Improvements
Optimised general rendering performance in the Layout View
Significantly improved tilemap rendering performance in the editor
Make it faster to open projects with thousands of instances
Runtime Opus decoder is now faster, uses less memory, and uses WebAssembly where supported
Share Construct 3 Release r50 Now