typingmaster

Hmm... It is a worry, but I'd like to think Scirra would resolve a bug like this - There must be C2 apps on the appstores that have been left on there for a few years, but then randomly in the future they might need a mandatory update (e.g. many years ago all Audio broke on HTML5 projects and all HTML5 projects needed updating, or there might be another law about GDPR or cookies that must be added to all appstore apps or something).

It raises the question - if someone needed to update their app after C2 is gone completely, and they were unable to port it to C3 due to 3rd party plugins and such, could they still use C2 to do this, or must they recreate their project in C3 just to add a small mandatory update. The former could be done as long as the bug you are mentioning is fixed, but if the latter is expected, then... well that's going to be bad for people in that situation...

Ashley

That is fair that the "Save to folder" is an experimental feature - I came to C3 hoping to recreate a similar environment to C2, so saving locally is far preferred, but I shouldn't be ticking the box if I didn't want to have unexpected results. I do wish I was informed though, like maybe utilising the C3 "Start Page" to list upcoming changes/warnings, rather than users stopping in their tracks and having to search the forums to see if it's being talked about, even if it is for an experimental feature.

Reporting bugs to companies - Personally I have not had to do this with C2 as you guys were always able to resolve whatever issues I had, but this was an observation of other people on the forum over the years.

My take is: It was understandable to spend time dealing with a bug in C2, but with C3 and paying money over and over for a subscription, time has way more value as we want to be making games and not dealing with reporting bugs to multiple places.

In my opinion, if there was an option to pay a bit extra per month/year for support where Scirra can investigate and contact who they feel is appropriate, I'd be happy to pay that knowing I have a direct path to solving a bug. Then I could focus on making games, rather than learning the intricacies of a bug that will be forgotten about once it is fixed, whilst money comes out of my bank paying for the subscription.

You guys do output an amazing amount of work and effort on C3, there is legitimate and clear talent and knowledge from yourself and your staff. Personally I REALLY want to return to C3 even after feeling a burnt out from previous experiences and even though peers around me think it's a bad choice to go with, but going by personal experience from jumping from C2 to C3, it's been very unpredictable. Hopefully if I try jumping over again, it will be a smooth experience.

Personally I'd suggest subscribing for 1 month and trying all you can to see what Construct 3's experience is like - try and port a project or two over and see how complex it is for you, and then you can decide whether to continue subscribing beyond this. You may be pleasantly suprised, but you may encounter things that ruin the experience. Porting your C2 game will be hopefully easy as long as you don't use most of the hundreds of amazing 3rd party plugins in C2.

I'd also say, if your financial situation is great, then Construct 3 could be worth subscribing to, but if you have limited time to develop your games (e.g. you work your day job and only have few hours each evening to develop games) and/or your finances are a bit limited but affordable, then no I could not recommend Construct 3.

I still use Construct 2 too, I subscribed to Construct 3 around April 2020 for a month or two but I cancelled and returned to Construct 2, as it wasn't a smooth experience compared to Construct 2.

One example: on a fresh install of Windows on a fresh Google Chrome install, no addons or anything, I subscribed to Construct 3, tried the "Dark" theme which I really want to use, and it was just laggy as heck for some reason, and I was thinking "I had to pay money to find this out?" since themes are not available in the free version. It was laggy in Firefox too, and then I tried Chrome Canary and it worked correctly... It's just not something I expected after Construct 3 has been out for a few years.

Perhaps the above issue was a Google Chrome issue, but then that's even worse since Google Chrome updates all the time and unexpected things will happen every now and then beyond Scirra's control. There were some bug reports about the "dark theme lag" issue but I never saw the outcome, but in my experience, Construct 2 never had this sort of long-winded issue (other than that "jitter" issue over the years).

Another example is that the "Save to folder" option disappeared one day randomly, and there was 1 mention of this on a random page on a stickied post on the forum, that threw my workflow off since I had to start saving in a different method, not a critical issue but cmon you're paying a subscription, you expect better than this, at least clear communication.

Recently I was trying to get back into Construct 3 by using the free version to test some things, I found a bug when using the drawing canvas - The bug was reproducable but I was not given a workaround or a sign that this bug would be fixed as it was "too complicated to fix" (until I posted about it on the forum and another user was kind enough to advise me with a workaround!). This bug does not happen in Construct 2 when using the 3rd party Paster plugin, so yet again Construct 2 comes off as superior.

These things may never occur to you or others, but it tainted my experience as Construct 2 simply just works imo, even after many windows updates and such (whilst Google Chrome updates and might suddenly randomly break something.)

Another observation I've seen from other users: Even though you're paying a subscription, you will find you will be asked to "report your bug to X company" and such, so you may need to spend time signing up to here there, emailing random companies, etc., which personally I just don't want to spend my time doing considering I'm paying a subscription (I would be more open to learning weird quirks and workarounds within Construct 3 if I was NOT paying a subscription).

It's not like Construct 3 is broken, it's extremely capable as much as Construct 2 is, it all comes down to the cost and what you get out of the money you pay, including support from Scirra. I recently saw one person leave due to Scirra's lack of empathy and overall poor handling dealing with a bug ( construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/rare-editor-bug-155235/page-2 ). I also had a negative experience when asking about having a guaranteed method to open and play old C3 files in the future, as much as noone on the thread shared the same sentiment with historic preservation as me (and perhaps using the word "legal" got peoples backs up against the wall), it was handled very unprofessionally imo. ( construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/terms-c3-reaches-end-life-152595 )

simstratic

I meant specifically hiding 9-patch from the "Paste with Effect" option where the bug is present, although thinking more about it, locking down options would be a worse idea as it wouldn't allow any workaround to exist all, so I take that back!

Yes in my case, my project is GUI heavy and player-customisation heavy, I made the strong assumption that pasting onto a canvas would be much better for CPU/GPU rather than having many concurrent effects. I did not want to choose the baked-in approach, as this limits customisation, and limits colour choice to whatever I picked.

I am unsure how to measure this (Is it better to have a low-end device to test on?), I tried measuring on my PC but I get no difference at all in draw calls and such with the two approaches. I may be wrong about the performance gain, but as of now, I don't know, I still feel more inclined to move the load onto RAM in my mind, there's plenty more RAM compared to GPU power, especially on lower-end mobile devices.

Regardless, the bug exists and is reproducable, and it's unknown whether it will be fixed due to the complexity of the effects compositor.

I decided not to bother trying to workaround the bug - I mean it works in C2 with paster and I have a licence already, rather than paying monthly/yearly for C3 to have to make my own workaround when it should just work as advertised (why not hide 9-patch objects from the "Paste Object" list? This will surely come up again with other people).

I purely wanted to subscribe to C3 for ease-of-use and not messing about with bugs or issues as often, and right away I've encountered a bug and I wasn't told whether it will be fixed or not, all I know is that "it's complicated"... yet it works in C2 perfectly.

My use-case for this was purely for performance gains - Being able to set an effect, paste it, then disable the effect, would give a performance boost in exchange for RAM usage (which is very minimal), especially when multiple 9-patches/sprites with different effect values are needed.

I hope Scirra reconsiders fixing the bug, or even making an internal "workaround" for bugged "Paste Object" instances, instead of leaving it up to the subscribers to fix.

Ah yes that's almost a better alternative, but I do need to retain the alpha channel on the 9patch, which I think the snapshot doesn't do. Thanks for the idea!

It's cool, I'll try my workarounds out later, if any work then I'll probably subscribe again to make this project. Its mostly menus and 9patches in my project so I would have hoped it worked like paster did in c2.

I was mostly worried about logging in one day to see the compositor was fixed but breaks my entire project that relies on whatever workaround I used.

Ah I see, thanks for the info about the bug!

I have a few ideas for workarounds to test, maybe even using 2 drawing canvases to get what I need (keep one at 0,0 like you said, then use a second drawing canvas to position and paste on the first drawing canvas), but I was mostly worried about a sudden fix in future messing up whatever workaround I produced.

Ayy, currently not subbed to C3, I was subbed before, but stopped due to some concerns, but I wanted to sub again knowing C2 will not be supported and knowing bugs will be fixed and such in C3.

So I saw "Drawing Canvas" finally can rotate in a recent update, which made me think Drawing Canvas is now better than Paster from C2 since it has everything needed!

However, I quickly tested pasting a 9-patch object with an effect, and it is glitched. I made a bug report but it was closed and has been reported similarly before. No sign of the bug ever being fixed.

Bug report here: github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/4202

So, Paster in C2 works perfectly and doesn't have this bug with pasting 9-patch objects, yet this bug with drawing canvas sounds like it may not be fixed due to the "complexity of the effects compositor".

I respect that it's a complicated engine, but Scirra are the programmers, Scirra created the "effects compositor" for their product, and therefore only Scirra can fix this bug... This confuses me, so what do I do now? Wait and hope? It is a very clear reproducible bug but I wasn't told "it will be considered in future" or "this will never be fixed"...

I reported the bug because its exactly what I needed for my project, I need 9patch objects to have effects and be pasted, and C3 is not able to do this and C2 CAN do this and I can't port my project over a bit more easily due to this (or even starting from scratch isn't easy).

So, my main question, if I start making a project that has a workaround with this bug, is that safe/recommended to do? The bug makes the "paste" result offset a bit weird so I could use adapt to this and get the desired effect I need, but I'm concerned that in the future, the drawing canvas will suddenly get updated, or effects compositor will be suddenly fixed and then my workarounds might become glitched and broken.

> question out of curiosity - are there cases where driver bugs affect cordova app performance but not chrome performance?

Yep.

Also the Chrome browser and the WebView (used in Cordova apps) have different GPU driver blacklists, which means you can get fast GPU acceleration in the Chrome browser but slow software rendering in the APK.

Oh. I would always test my project by using Chrome on Android, as I assumed that this was a good way to see the performance of my project on mobile.

I always thought to worry about building APK's nearer the end of a project, as long as my project worked well in Chrome. If anything, I thought there'd be a performance boost when doing a final APK build, since it's a stripped down Chrome, but I see.

Is there a workaround available for people that have this? Can we change the GPU blacklists if they're different per app? Or force to ignore the blacklist on all devices?

Well, yeah, you're right, Doom 5 or any triple A game would need to optimise their code extremely high.

You may be doing something that's considered expensive even in 2D or 3D, such as doing too many collision checks per tick (let's say its in the hundreds thousands, your poor little phone CPU will choke on that).

Or maybe your picking logic is too heavy (phones are not databases and you need to minimise reoccurring picking. Even with 80 sprites, if you had several "for each" loops then you quickly multiply the engine needing to re-pick everything all over again).

Or maybe your use of effects (maybe not as you mentioned gpu usage is down).

I'm making random guesses as we have no clue what your game is designed like. How about check the event CPU profiler, see which group of events (if you have used groups) that is the heaviest on the CPU, and then post a screenshot of the events within that group so we can check it out?

Even a typical phone's UI that you use everyday is not updating at 60fps, or even 30fps - it updates the areas of the screen as it is needed, so sometimes it's sitting at 0fps - optimisation is needed, even in games that seem simple!

Ayy, you should post the project file, or a more simple version. Makes it easier to rule out event performance issues.