I don't think there's a effects SDK... we have to do everything as either extensions or behaviors, maybe there's a way to make a behavior called "extra effects", which when added would extend the effects available to an object, but I believe it would be a bit of a hack.

I'd like some assurances that the game will be done, other than "your word"

Just thought it might interest you people, it's a webinar by O'reilly called Applying Old Video Game Performance Techniques to Modern Web-based Games

you can register at this link: http://oreillynet.com/pub/e/2229

remember the webcast will be on june 13 - 10 am pacific time (who the hell uses these weird names anyways??? it's 18:00 GMT for those of you who know what standards are)

I like the movement. Really nice addition to the behavior list.

Adding WARP would make a this good behavior great!!!!!!!

Explain this feature further and I'll see what I can do.

What do you mean by warp?

Ashley, can you disable logging of those _reloadpoll_ requests? It's kind of annoying when you're trying to debug your own extensions.

Run Command

The ability of executing external applications.

Please explain this further. Do you mean an actual "run an external program" action? If so, forget it, it will never happen (due to security concerns), except if an exe exporter gets made.

Be aware that laws vary country by country, and that legal advice over the internet is difficult and, in most cases, downright dangerous.

In addition, it is useful to create a new thread for each topic, if the topics are unrelated - for instance, you'd create one for your legal questions and one for your capx problem. This helps people with similar questions find what they're looking for without having to create a topic.

In relation to your questions:

• You can sell your game if all of my sprites, music, and programming are homemade and original. You could even include third party assets if you have written, explicit permission from the copyright owner (usually the author, but in some cases the publisher) or if the item's license explicitly allows it - for instance, all of my plugins/behaviors (as of this post) are free, including for commercial use - though I appreciate being mentioned in the credits. Keep in mind, however, that some things are protected, such certain names and drawings - you cannot make a megaman clone with the exact same characters, names and setting, even if you draw and program them yourself - though you can create a megaman clone, with the same visual/audio style and mechanics, as long as you name it something like HyperMaxiMan - though this practice is frowned upon by everyone, and you likely won't get many sales (there are exceptions to this rule, but you must fully understand what you are doing and for what purpose before you consciously make the decision to break the rule).
• You do not need a Construct 2 business license to sell your games, and there is no such thing as a "resale" license, AFAIK. You only need a business license if you're running a "for profit" organization or if you make more than $5000 in profits using c2
• You don't "get" a copyright. Again, this varies from country to country, but in most places there is no actual paperwork involved in copyrighting something. You just include some text somewhere like "copyright [yourname] [year the thing was first released], all rights reserved". This is enough to protect you from most thieves, but you might want some extended legal protection if you're creating the next angry birds, in which case consult with a lawyer.

I propose a workaround that makes tools viable and doesn't require a major re-engineering of C2:

Whenever you are working on a project, construct will "save" that project on a temp folder. If changes are made to that folder by an external application, construct simply reopens the project.

Since the XML format is easy to read and modify, and a file modification would trigger a c2 reload, modifying the project is easy (if a bit hackish).

This solves all the points mentioned above, and with a bit more work could even mean something like deeper spriter-construct integration or a RPG Toolkit, while at the same time being easy to implement.

If construct ignores unknown tags or provides a tag that will be ignored (such as <extension>) it becomes possible to save tool information along with the project.

Further improvements could include a way to trigger construct to save the currently open project (instead of it automatically saving from time to time), a way to trigger a reload (instead of it constantly checking for modifications) and a way to add "toolbars" to construct, with buttons and controls that invoke programs (with commandline parameters) - said toolbars can even be extended to be context sensitive, or be able to open menus. Such a solution is cheaper to make than a C++ SDK while maintaining construct itself clean and unbloated and leveraging the power of c2's open XML format.

I've been a game designer for a long time, but only recently (3~ years) decided to study it seriously, purchasing books, reading postmortems, blogs, watching projects by other indies, and one thing that pops up constantly is the fact that indies who code their own engines from scratch fail more often than indies that use a ready made engine.

This should be obvious to some - an engine being developed actively has had more time to mature, more testing (and less bugs), and in the case of companies like Scirra, you can be assured technical support when things get ugly.

I moved away from MMF because it didn't seem like a professional product - very few people had commercial success with it, and most told stories of struggling hard with the engine, many projects (real time strategy games, for instance) were theoretically possible - all elements could be made - but the code became so spaghetti that coding an entire game with it became unfeasible.

When I made the move, I thought a lot about whether I should get a "real" coding engine or stick with something visual, and ended up here, because I believe this style of programming can be made just as powerful as written code.

In my experience with construct, however, you often have to break out an editor and hack together a plugin to work on a more difficult task (such as dynamically loading a sprite's image via a url you got from an ajax response consisting of an array of objects). I have no problems with that, and when I have time I polish my plugins/behaviors and release them to the public.

I am, however, missing something most successful engines have, and that is felt throughout the forums: a way to customize construct itself.

Many users request things like "automatically snap to grid", tile based map making, sprite sheet importing, stuff that could easily be done if we had a way to hook into construct 2 itself and extend it. You could make a system to iterate over all your objects marked as "enemies", add the "health" property and set it's initial value to a file stored somewhere. You could even make an "enemy editor" that would create code for those enemies based on some properties fine-tuned to your game.

Think about how extremely hard it is right now to make something as simple as dialog trees, which are essential to RPG games - how would you do it? Hardcode each line? Then when you change the name of one of the characters, what do you do? You can't just "search and replace". And if the solution is to open the XML files generated by construct and edit them , you end up with a tool that require a crooked workflow: save project -> close construct -> open tool -> modify files -> close tool -> open construct -> hope nothing breaks, and you'll resist upgrading, because it might break your tool.

So, my question is, will we have a way to properly communicate with construct, telling it to spawn IDE elements, execute actions on the users behalf, save modifications in the tool into the project and so on?

if you placed it in \ htdocs \ construct then you should request localhost/construct/jax.php instead of localhost/jax.php

maybe something can be added to the spec, where a file created by your app can always be updated/deleted by your app?

Please please please make a json object capable of traversing complex objects! If not, I'll have to make one (that uses expressions like jquery) myself :(