Wow, this looks really cool! Kind of like crayon physics? I'm pretty amazed you could do this in C2. I suspect there is a bit of math-fu involved...

I just found out that I could replicate one of my Paster-only tricks right in C2 by combining 'CanvasSnapshot' with the Sprite action 'Load image from URL' (which can take a dataURI as well) to paste a copy of my current screen to a sprite image.

In my case I'm using it to 'flatten' a number of layers together and apply a blur to it. By using this approach, I can smoothly 'fade-in' a blur effect even on my modest android device, which isn't possible when I apply blur to multiple layers. I can't blur the whole layout because I have an overlay that I want to stay unblurred.

The problem is, whenever I grab a canvas snapshot and past it to a sprite, the engine halts for a few frames (more than a few on android). I notice that we only have the option of grabbing the canvas as a png/jpeg. Is the on-the-fly (de)compression the reason behind this slowdown? Or is this just a demanding operation that takes a ton of CPU on its own?

I don't see an issue with installing third party plugins. Making plugins official would just transfer the burden of maintaining the plugins from the third party developers to basically Ashley, which I don't think would be a good trade off. It would require a lot of time to debug and add features since he'd have become familiar with what the code is doing. More likely the plugins would be made from scratch with differing features in mind so it would be different.

And while I'm flattered that a few of my plugins/behaviors were mentioned I'm happy to keep updating them myself.

Worst case if a new C2 update breaks my plugins a fix may take a bit to come out.

TiAm

By auto-rest state do you mean sleeping? If so the behavior already has that. Look at the "is sleeping" condition.

I haven't used chipmunk a lot yet, so perhaps I'm speaking out of my hat. I'll take a look at the 'is sleeping' condition.

I'm all for a store with third party plug-ins that are supported by those third parties. For example, I'd be happy to pay for a maintained version of chipmunk for c2.

But I also think there are some plugs that are too important to be left to an unpaid third party to maintain. IMHO, Canvas/Paster is one of those.

zatyka

Great example! I would have headed towards some sort of tilemap based solution, but this is far more elegant and efficient.

+1 for Chipmunk. It has loads of very useful features although it wouldn't hurt to implement Box2D in full.

Pater & Canvas too.

I would love to see chipmunk become an official option. BUT, I don't think there's much chance of that happening.

I can't imagine Ashley maintaining 2 separate physics engines. Chipmunk's lack of an auto-rest state is also a drawback for mobile, even though it works better when things get crazy.

Would love to see Box2D expanded.

I've been think about this a bit lately.

It seems like C2 is becoming pretty mature now. Most of the extant limitations are to do with the IDE, which seems unlikely to change much until C3.

With the IDE on the back-burner, what I'd like to see is the incorporation of important third party addons (behaviors, plugins, effects) as official. Much like what happened with the 'Function' plugin, which was a game changer for C2.

The first thing that comes to mind is Paster/Canvas. It's mind-boggling what can be done with it, and it would be an invaluable addition to the native C2 toolkit.

LiteTween is another time saving behavior that should be in C2 by default. It's simpler and more intuitive than mucking around with lerp/qarp/cubic, and as it's mostly just value manipulation, it would be unlikely to break very often.

There are many more great plugins, but those would be my top two.

Yours?

Awesome, thanks! The GLSL shaders that come with C2 are a little hit and miss, it's great to have alternatives.

Somebody

I think R0J0hound might have just helped you out of your issue with the HSL effect.

Somebody

Do you have an intel processor? If so, you could try switching to the iGPU, and see if the artifacts resolve. Did you try node-webkit? Might be worth a shot.

Maybe if you forced the software rendered mode of webgl, the effect would work correctly. I think you could do that in node-webkit by passing it the right startup argument (don't know it off the top of my head).

Of course, that can be quite slow on anything but a beast of a computer, but you might get a more accurate result. Would be worth it for StuffGen.

Ashley

You posted a good summary/explanation of our current mobile export options in the build notes for r192. Any chance of seeing this reposted and expanded upon for the next blog post?

It's really good info, but I don't know how many people bother reading changelogs for old beta releases.

So, webview+ is basically ludei's cordova based build service, right? So it's comparable to crosswalk? How does it run on android 4.x devices?

Sometimes all these export options get my head spinning a bit...

I've actually read some really positive opinions of wp8. Unfortunately, they just didn't sell. Kind of sad that microsoft actually made a good mobile OS from scratch, then flopped in the market.

Platform-agnostic development like C2 is great for emerging platforms, but they can't expect us to go to a lot of effort to make things work if the market share is that tiny. :/

I find the colored tabs kind of confusing, as the colors are arbitrary. It would be awesome to be able to specify what color tab would represent a particular layout or event sheet.