I think you should load levels only when they complete the prev one. Not sure how you do this in C2 though.

Its quite easy to get rid of the address bars in iphone. You just need to edit the export-fs.html template, use window.scrollTo(1, 0) and set the window height to an extra 60 px. Works a treat. The same strategy will work to give full screen for Android, but I haven't done it yet as am too busy with iphone versions for now. Android is a bit trickier, as there are different heights of address bar.

If you use an app on iphone, you have to pay apple 30% of cost don't forget, and go through the pain of acceptance.

I would not even think about supporting ipad 3 native resolution - just go with ipad 2 res (1024x768) and switch off the retina display mode in the project settings. The ipad will automatically upscale the result, and most players would not be able to tell the difference - it looks good.

Your PC would noteven be able to handle ipad3 resolution, unless you own a macbook pro with retina display, or stack 2x 30" displays as I have.

Ive been using all the releases for the last 2 months, and today is the first time its crashed for no apparent reason, losing about 6 hours of hard work. I am shocked that there is no auto backup feature to protect users, like there is in word for example. If that crashes, it opens right up with the version you were more or less just editing.

I had setup 1 hour backups in the preferences to dropbox with the first version I installed (95). To my horror, I see that these have not carried through tot he current version - my backup folder slots are all empty - no backups.

Let this be a lesson to self - save every few minutes hitting the save button.

As I keep all my projects in dropbox anyway, ive just setup location 1 in the backup preferences to be on my local D drive,and set the frequency to be 15 minutes. if there was an option for 5 minutes, I would chose that. This will be my crash emergency recovery

C2 developers, please consider adding something like this by default, even if its to save one backup every 15 minutes in the same directory as the project.

With crop mode, if you want to anchor a sprite to say the top and have it centered, you set the "left edge" to "window left" and "right edge" to "window right".

Heres a one sprite capx:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bh6pinkzyr3c6s2/broken_anchor_103.capx

Except in 103 it doesn't seem to work in FF and IE - as you resize the window, the left edge jumps around and is generally too far left, and sometimes the entire sprite disappears (and then its gone until you refresh the page), and sometimes it wraps, and sometimes it even produce two half height sprites!

Id seems pretty broken - or I'm doing something pretty stupid!

I also tried it with webgl switched off - didn't help. Ive even updated my graphics driver to one issued about 2 weeks ago from nvidia.

Some screen shots (the box should be centered on the screen with the same gap on the left and right hand sides.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9jdehk5yu9jsd06/anchor1.PNG

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hduoucz5yzbgnya/anchor2.PNG

Yes, I think C2 is great, and should stick to its unique point and click interface and not introduce any programming/scripting languages. I also know the to do list must be full of great ideas and requirements.

I'm thinking that user defined events could but added like families were: to make the existing graphical point and click interface even more powerful with no extra learning curve. It may even be possible to share event sheets across projects at some point, assuming that objects are reference by names and you keep the same object names in both projects.

I might even check out the function plugin!

Long live C2!

That depends on which way you can scroll. If say you want to support the ipad in landscape mode, and you can drive "up" the screen, then you could have a background which is 1024 wide (the width of the ipad2), and as long as you like (depends how far you want to drive!) Check out the spaceblaster example projects in the c2 install dir. By coincidence, it has a background size of 1024x5120. I think this wraps round, so you don't go off the top.

C2 is awesome, but coming from actionscript events based programming with large teams of developers, I find that these are my biggest challenges:

1) no user defined events.

E.g. there are about 20 places I want to say end the game for various different reasons and do a load of house keeping and display stuff, i.e.I want to raise an event called "gameEnded" with some parameters, and have one event handler defined. Importing event sheets goes part way to solving this, but is more like a "goto". Also, the concept of change listeners would be nice, so if say the score changed, this could trigger some actions.

2) no way to re-use code. I re-type a lot of code in a lot of games which are all similar to each other. This is a bit of a maintenance nightmare - when I change the common "library" code, I will have to edit 30+ games, and retest them all in case I made the C2 equivalent of a typo. You dont seem to be able to cut and paste actions between projects, even if you call the objects the same names. I experimented with manually editing the event sheets in notepad++, but kept crashing C2 (not surprisingly).

There is a function plugin someone wrote, but as a general rule we don't touch plugins if they are not part of the supported C2 product so may end up not being maintained, bug fixed or working with a release.

BrianOD

WE use 1024x1024 for our backgrounds, as this is the max resolution of the ipad 1 & 2 and 3 with retina turned off (which is why we export the project into two separate versions - one for ipad 1&2 and one for ipad 3 as you cant turn off retina display at runtime).   An easier option for you might be to scale the game up for ipad 3, and keep retina display option on. This is because detecting the difference between ipad 2 and 3 requires javascript (cant be done using useragent).

Scaled versions of the game look good, and surprisingly don't seem to impact performance.

There are android tablets out there with greater than 1024, we currently dont support these as we dont have time to test them.

Android is your biggest nightmare - stick to iphone and ipad to start with (but dont expect it to run in iphone3 - its shockingly slow - we get 1FPS compared to 200 on ipad 3). Unfortunately, you need javascript to detect the iphone 3 (not 3gs) to put up a "not supported" page.

Actually - just had an idea - it might be possible to write a quick speed test in C2 when the app starts up (e.g. move a sprite with some effects), and if it gets less than say 10 fps then put up an unsupported message.

People don't seem to understand that letterbox scale is totally inappropriate for commercial mobile games.   The black bars are not acceptable to any customer, and when you rotate to landscape, most of the screen is black bars so you cant even use the gui as the buttons are too small.

The GUI has to cover the entire screen keeping the aspect ratio.

None has black bars in their casino/gambling games. Look at the html5 slots from companies like IGT, NetEnt, Probability etc. (e.g. on William Hills and paddypower mobile websites).

We have developed about 100 Flash games, and a number of games based on the BigWorld and Unreal engines. For us, all desktop and mobile applications will be done in Flash and Air, as this is a superior platform if one has the flash expertise.

However, where Construct 2 offers huge value is in its HTML5 mobile games development - there is no competition in this space.   When it gets a few more mobile focused features, I will be able to sell it many times over. :)

Ashley, the supporting multiple screen sizes is good, but only covers a very small percentage of what is needed for mobile. Mobile is a completely different beast to PC games, and you have to have both landscape and portrait layouts (I would love to put them on the same layout, but havent figured out how to do this, as you cant change anchor parameters at runtime). Also, you have to implement swipe, getting rid of the address bars, Handling wildly different screen sizes, aspect ratios and pixel densities.   Those 12 points I put in are essential to supporting mobile - the competition all do swipe, no address bars and landscape/portrait etc, so we have to.

If I wrote a supporting mobile tutorial now, it would be 10 pages or more - its not easy (not because C2 is bad, but because its genuinely hard, and not many people are doing it - they use phonegap etc).

I thought I had finally a perfect solution to cover all of our target platforms, now the iphone5 has come out with yet another resolution, and I expect it will be difficult to detect it server side (i.e the useragent string will be the same)

Im guessing that appmobi and phonegap solve a lot of the mobile issues. These are not an option for us as we do casino style games, which are not allowed in the appstore, and also we dont want to pay apple 30%.

If you wrote the games in js and HTML5, you would have the same issues.

I did a few prototypes in Impact, and this has similar issues (and you need to know javascript).