Wait a week or two?

I realize that I don't have a ship date for Construct 3 ... the closest I've found is "summer". Oh, wait, summer is a-commin' in, Cookoo! It is mid-May and Summer is ... June?

I want Construct 3 and I've never been patient. I'm more than thrilled to upgrade for a year at half-price, so take my money, Ashley!

My main export desires are (in order):

* Android

* Amazon

* iOS

* Chromebook

* Mac

* Tizen

* Windows

* Ubuntu

* Windows Phone

Construct 2 has a way to export games to the Amazon and Chrome App stores. Is this ability in Construct 3 now? Both seem like they might be possible soon because Amazon had (and still may have but I can't tell) an HTML5 app program and Chromebook still does.

Has anyone successfully built and exported a game to the Amazon App Store?

Has anyone successfully built and exported a game to the Chromebook App Store?

And for that matter, what about Android? Does Construct 3 export to Android? Has anyone done it? And furthermore is the Intel XDK still working? I hear good things about the new Cocoon export to Android. What about iOS?

I have some projects I want to build in C3. Can I do it for Amazon, Chromebook, Android, and iOS. I'm especially intrigued with the idea I could build on a Chromebook and export to Android, now that Chromebooks run Android apps!!!

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm coming back to Construct 3 and making it my main machine primarily because Construct 3 will run on anything that runs Chrome. I love Chromebooks and want to make that my main machine.

I'm seeing some interest in a MIDI API lurking around Google. I'll let you know when I find out more.

I haven't tried this lately but I want to go through his book again. It may be that things changed in a later release of Construct 2. You could try the author, who seems like a good guy in general.

[quote:1uakhcu8]Has anything changed for AUDIO since your last blog post, almost a year ago?

Nope. Pre-Windows 7 you need to encode your own AAC. I don't think the Windows built-in encoder is still very good, so you might want to encode your own AAC anyway if audio quality is important.

Good to know. If I encode my own AAC (and OGG), I'm good to go! THANK YOU!

I wrote about this in my blog for Firefox OS using HTML5. You can read it here if you want to see the underlying native HTML5 code. http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2013/12/device-orientation-game-programming.html.

The technical term is device orientation.

Unfortunately, the sad answer is:

1. Not all device manufacturers support this.

2. Not all browsers support this.

I wanted to go further with this but there isn't enough support yet. Sorry!

And believe me - out of all the people on this boards or/and the internet - he was the nicest commentator that could come around. It could been worse.

It could have been me.

I hadn't encountered not-nice commentators on the Construct 2 forums before today. I've been away and I guess things have changed.

[quote:1yprb2ge]My blog post (so far) seems to be accurate

In my opinion importing Kenney's tiles to a Sprite object (as an animation frames)

is not only ignorant, but also totally useless. And it has nothing in common with Tilemap object.

I thought that because this technique of importing tiles into a sprite object was okay. After all, it was one of the main features of Ashley's tutorial on Platforming. You might want to read this page https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2 written by Ashley. He clearly is using the Sprite object and pulling in tiles from the Tiles.png bitmap which is given free to all Construct 2 buyers.

If this technique is not to be given to beginners, you should have Ashley remove it from the tutorials. It's clearly in the Tutorials -> Beginners -> Workflow section.

And rest assured, I will change every thing in my post so that it only talks about sprite sheets, the sprite object, but if it is okay with you, I will call the pieces of art inside the sprite sheet, tiles, following Ashley's lead in the tutorial cited above.

Or are you objecting to Kenney's tiles?

This forum has a lot of beginners and people who are new to game development, it would be ethical if you remove your blog link or amend the terminology as quick as possible. This can cause misleading idea on C2, I'm sure you don't want to do this to beginner, it can cause snowballing effect.

Note on the "tile" terminology, I think it would be much helpful if you don't force the term that is accepted outside C2 onto the community, because it is fairly established here that "tile" is referenced to tile background and tilemaps. For "sprite", people would just call it animation or just sprite. Use of terminology would certainly change, if you found something confusing, you should be requesting for terminology amendment from Ashley, not to use them to make your point.

I agree with shinkan, experienced users might laugh at the mishap, but misleading beginners is a bigger concern. This is a serious suggestion, I'm not joking.

I'll change the terminology in my blog post.

You can write a web worker in your own plugin if you think there's something that could benefit from it, but they are best suited for relatively long running tasks (like pathfinding, where it is already used). Posting messages between workers has some overhead so if the amount of work is small, the communication overhead will be larger than the work to be done, negating the benefit of using a worker. In a game engine there's not much that qualifies for that, most tasks are small and synchronous.

Export-time image deduplication will remove identical images between object types, but it won't reduce memory use in preview, and it's more sensible to use one object type for one set of images anyway. All frames of all animations are loaded regardless of if they are used, as described in memory usage.

Ashley, thanks for the links!

Web Workers are cool. The best use I've seen for them are in BrowserQuest (http://browserquest.mozilla.org/ a MMO in a browser, where Web Workers are used to draw nearby areas before you walk into them.

I've been using the technique you wrote about in your tutorial on Platform Games https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2 where you load in a sprite sheet as an animation and then drop the sprite objects into your Layout but change the image by choosing an index into the animation array. So it sounds like if I import a sprite sheet with 50 images, and I only use 10 images in the Layout, I'll still be charged for the other 40? Sounds like I'll have to redo my sprite sheet (except that I bought it from someone so copying the art to a new image might be a chore).

Ashley Has anything changed for AUDIO since your last blog post, almost a year ago? https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/2/the-never-ending-issue-of-dual-encoding. I'm a big fan of OGG and it sounds like AAC is better than MP3 (both in quality and licensing for streaming), but what happens if you try to use Construct 2 on Windows before Windows 7? And has the Windows 7 AAC encoder improved? I don't have any more copies of Windows XP, but I'm still running Vista on an old Alienware PC - Dell refuses to write Windows 7 drivers! I'll see how Construct 2 audio runs on Vista.

I really appreciate your championing of OGG!

[quote:3kqa38w2]1. Web workers are already in C2. For example Pathfinding behavior is using it.

Sounds like a good use. But there's no way to use workers in some other way on my own.

[quote:3kqa38w2]You can modify original sprite sheet to contain only frames you want to import, or you can specify h and v cells to import everything and simply delete frames you don't need.

Once a frame is deleted, it won't be in memory or part of the final export, right?

[quote:3kqa38w2]As for the memory part. If sprite is present on the layout then every single animation frame will be loaded into a memory.

So if your sprite have 5 animations and each animation have 10 frames, all of the 50 frames will be loaded.

So if I have 10 copies of a sprite and each sprite has 10 frames (but only one animation), does that mean that 100 frames will be loaded into memory?

I need to learn more about tilemaps!

Thanks!

These may have been answered somewhere, but I only could find hints.

1. Any chance of introducing Web Workers and multi-threading? Every browser supports it. Good for calculation-intensive games.

2. When I was reading the How to Make a Platform Game tutorial by Ashley https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2, one of the comments made me think that if I import a sprite sheet but only use a few sprites from it, the while sheet goes into the game and takes up a lot of space. Is this correct? I kind of assumed that any sprites not used in a sprite sheet were discarded. I ask because I'm using some commercial sprite sheets that are quite large but I only want to use a dozen or so, not the several hundred in the sheet. Should I redraw the sprite sheet? If I just erase the sprites I don't want, will the blank parts of the sprite sheet still be pulled in? Or, if I go through the Animation frames window and delete any unwanted frames, my memory usage will be better?