Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • I think anything that involves curation or triage of hundreds of suggestions is not going to work. We want to spend our time improving Construct 3, not researching the feasibility of things only one person wants. Only us developers know the codebase well enough to really evaluate that, and even then, as my past blog post describes, it's often impossible to know what the work will really entail once we start it. Small ideas can easily snowball in to lots of work, so even an initial evaluation that says "should be easy" could simply be wrong.

    For this reason I think it would be best to remove the "minor suggestions" category, so we stop pretending we know what is and isn't easy, because in truth we don't know. I think we should also aim to design something where we are not expected to reply to every single suggestion. It's just too much work, and often our conclusions about feasibility are completely wrong anyway. I think the things people are willing to actually commit their votes to is the best signal to rely on, in the context of the suggestions platform (as the guidelines stress, there are other things we take in to account too, outside of the suggestions platform).

    I quite like the idea of basically deleting everything and starting from scratch every 6 months. It sounds like it would solve a lot of the problems. Instead of accumulating a mountain of old suggestions and votes, it keeps things fresh. It would be focused on what people want now, rather than what lots of votes went to in previous years, perhaps even by users who are no longer active.

    I still think everyone should have a limited number of votes, probably just 10. Once you've voted on 10 things, chances are beyond that there is very little chance it'll really get done. What's the point in voting on 50 things if we only have time to do maybe 20 across everyone's suggestions? I think it's better if every six months you pick your top ten suggestions and that's it. You can always change your votes and vote on other things after the next reset. I also don't think there's any point in submitting suggestions with zero votes. If nobody is willing to put a single vote on it - not even the original author - it seems easy to conclude it's not a priority, given the vast amount of other work that could be done. In fact maybe we should even state our policy is to ignore suggestions with zero votes, to discourage anyone posting them. There's no point inundating us with hundreds of suggestions, so this seems like it would help mitigate that.

    So: how does it sound to have a complete reset of the suggestions platform every 6 months, and everyone gets 10 votes? Any particular objections to that? I'm inclined to move towards doing that in the next few weeks, unless anyone can persuade me of a better way to do it... (and note if your proposal involves us doing lots of regular work or users being able to inundate us with ideas, I probably won't be keen!)

  • Transparency doesn't work well with depth buffers which are required for 3D rendering. This is a known limitation and is probably going to stay.

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  • Well, if you're not willing to move your existing votes to newly submitted ideas, then presumably the ideas you've already voted on are more important to you, right? So sorting by highest voted first seems to be the most fair approach.

  • That would break things, which is why we haven't changed it.

  • Many of the 1000 ideas are outdated and no longer relevant. What we asking is to review at least recently posted ideas.

    This is still potentially a great deal of work. As I said, it can involve a fair bit of research and prototype to comment on it at all. And if we make an incorrect or misleading comment, people will get upset.

    I really hope you are not judging the ideas by the number of votes they receive.

    I am kind of mystified by this comment. It is the entire purpose of the system. We want to focus our work on the most popular ideas that lots of people want - not ideas that only one or two out of thousands of customers want. With such limited resources, it would be unfair to the majority of users, if someone managed to force us to spend our valuable time implementing a feature only they or a small number of people want.

    People will switch to posting their ideas on the forum, this will at least give them a lot more exposure.

    Ideas posted to the forum eventually fall in to the back pages and get lost. One of the reasons we set the system up was to solve this problem. If we get rid of it, I expect we will go back to ideas being lost and forgotten in the forum, which I'm not sure is better.

    I'll try to make some time next week to go through the suggestions platform and update the status on some of the ideas, starting with the ones with the highest votes (as those are presumably the ones most people care about). I guess one way to solve the insurmountable-amount-of-work problem is to be more proactive about rejecting ideas that are especially difficult or not something we envision as likely to be done. But that also can upset people and result in angry customers. At least ideas left alone can still collect votes if lots of people think they're important.

    I think the solution is to figure out how to have fewer ideas that most people care about. Having hundreds of suggestions covering years and years of potential work is indeed getting unmanageable. So, if anyone has any ideas on how to radically reduce the number of ideas, let me know... but I'm pretty sure things like letting people have more votes, and be able to submit more ideas, will just make this much worse.

  • As the suggestions platform guidelines describe, the intention is just to collect feedback, and we don't guarantee that any suggestions will be implemented. The reason I keep coming up with "we're a small company" is it's true, and it's by far the biggest limitation we face in our ability to get things done. Frankly given our size I'm proud of how much we actually do get done.

    Only 2 are marked as "shipped" this year.

    That's misleading - I figure you're looking at the "shipped" category, sorted by recent. In that case the dates are when the submission was submitted, not when we marked it shipped. So if a suggestion posted in 2020 was shipped this year, in that view you'd think we didn't do it this year, but we did. Given the suggestion platform has been up close to 4 years, and 200 ideas are shipped, that works out to about 50 a year, or one a week. And that includes ideas that were major projects that took months to complete, like the scene graph feature.

    It would be really helpful if you could mark ideas that you are considering to implement.

    The problem with the size of the suggestions tracker is with 1000 ideas, it's a huge amount of administrative work merely to review them. Providing a useful comment is often difficult unless we research the options and experiment with some prototyping. Doing this for every idea is just an absolute mountain of work and could tie us up for months, during which time we get nothing done at all. So, perversely, providing useful feedback on every idea means would mean we actually implement fewer features.

    I don't think the "minor suggestions" category works that well, because users often don't have the technical knowledge to know if what they are asking for is actually easy or not. It can still take a fair amount of research (e.g. examining thousands of lines of code to estimate how easy a change would be to make to our existing codebase) and prototyping work to evaluate what is ostensibly a minor suggestion, which ends up being a lot of work. In fact I wrote a whole blog about this a while ago, on the unexpected complications of minor features, which covers two cases which turned in to loads of work, for example.

    Every time I post a new idea, I have to revoke a vote from one of my older ideas.

    Well, I think this is kind of reasonable actually. With 1000 ideas, which I estimate is probably about 10 years worth of work, how useful is it really to throw another idea on the pile? I'd rather we had fewer popular ideas, rather than a mountain of things only one or two people want. That's what the limited voting is for. It's meant to force you to pick a few things you really care about, and not so you can inundate us with hundreds of ideas amounting to an infeasibly huge amount of work.

    In the feature guidelines I wrote back in 2017, I did write about some of my fears how this might end up working badly:

    In particular we are worried about people making statements like "Scirra don't listen to their customers - they're ignoring this feature even though everyone wants it". If that kind of thing happens a lot, we will probably just shut down the suggestion platform.

    So if the suggestions platform just ends up being a big source of disappointment and complaints, I guess we could just shut it down. But do you really think that would be better? At least people can vote on popular things as it is.

  • it was a requirement (before) that you could only create instances of an object if the object already existed.

    Note this is not true in the C3 runtime - you can still create instances even if there are no instances in the project. But in this case, having an unused layout with an instance placed on it lets you control the initial properties used when you create an instance.

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    Discussing illegal activities such as cracking our software is against the Forum & Community guidelines (and surely against common sense too). Closing thread.

  • Then you can set the project 'Rendering mode' property to '3D' to force 3D mode. The default is 'Auto', which means to enable 3D if the project uses any 3D features.

  • If you put all the events in an event sheet in an event group, you can then put static local variables at the top inside that group. Then these act like global variables scoped to one event sheet.

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    Locking as this is a duplicate of the thread posted here. Please don't cross-post the same message as per the Forum & Community guidelines.

  • A standard feature of dropdown list controls is that you actually can type in them. I think it works in most software, not just Construct. It's kind of an invisible feature so is not very discoverable, but providing the dropdown is focused, you can just start typing and it will select the first item that starts with what you typed. You can start again by just waiting a short period of time which resets it, and start typing something new again.

    Also if you have loads of global variables, maybe you could use some other techniques to better organise them, like local static variables, use global Sprite instances with instance variables, use a Dictionary, etc.

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Ashley

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