Very interesting observations about groups. I had no idea they impacted performance, as I use them only for organisational purposes, not for switching events on and off. Certainly something to be aware of.

jayderyu, so are you saying that if C2 had been designed to be more objected orientated, with event sheets being attached to objects rather than scene level, then it would potentially have much better performance? Would be a nice option to have it both ways, but I guess that would require a complete architectural change. One of the things that is cool about Godot is that you can attach scripts at the scene level or the object level, which gives you a lot of creative options. GMS can certainly get confusing at times, when you come back to an old project and wonder where the hell you attached your code!

Would have been interesting if C2 had gone down the Haxe/OpenCL path, but if the compile time is anything like Stencyl 3 then maybe not the best idea.

I still think Scirra should hire an extra dev to just do native exports (most people just want Android/IOS/Windows in addition to html5) and then charge $100 for each exporter. It would solve a lot of problems.

serpent ....If you want to go down the open source path, I would steer clear of Torque. Try the new Godot Engine, or even Enigma, which is a GMS clone. Or the free GameDevelop, which is very C2-like, but not as good.

serpent, yeah I hear you on this one! C2 was the thing that got me back into making games and it is mostly a joy to use. The problems I have found myself going around in circles on, have all been performance based. So, you end up pulling aspects out of your game and simplifying it to get better performance,(which granted is a part of any dev process). But my frustration has been due to inconsistency between versions of node webkit , with performance going up and down depending on its version and just general freezes/ stutters. I gather this is mainly from Javascript's garabage collection routines.

So in tandem to working on a couple of C2 games, I have learnt GMS/GML, which has a truly horrible IDE, but has given me excellent and consistent performance. At the moment I am continuing development in C2 but have ported one game over to GMS. This has enabled me to go from a stuttering 720p game to a consistent 60fps 1080p game on the same machine . Granted this is a physics based game and my main test machine is a 5 year old core2 duo Win8 machine. Even on my powerful 6 core desktop machine, a 720p C2 game just still feels a bit jerky in chrome. Not blaming C2, I just feel html5/chrome is just not there yet for high performance arcade games, especially if you want 1080p.

Ideally I want C2's IDE and event system with GMS native output formats. I don't particularly like GMS at all, or the company, but you can't argue with some of the commercial successes coming out of it these days. And there is consistency to its exports, which is the main thing for me. For the time being I will finish off my C2 game, my GMS game and then decide which direction to take my many other prototypes. Also learning Godot Engine, which is probably the direction I will go long term.

I will always keep C2 around, at the very least for prototyping, or for a pure web based project.

Anyway, not trying to denigrate C2, as it is a brilliant and very approachable piece of software, just venting some frustration. I am sure there are many that will disagree with me and refute these claims Hopefully all these issues will be irrelevant in a year's time, and I can eat my words!

Was surprised to see that no one has mentioned the recently open sourced Godot engine, so figured I would add a short post on it. This won't appeal the average C2 user as you need to be able to script. If however, you know your way around Python or can can code in general, you will probably find it very interesting

It has separate 2d and 3d engines, and unlike the recent Unity foray into 2d, it is a true pixel based 2d engine. It is all based upon a hierarchical/node based object system that is driven by scripts created in GDScript(based on Python). It has a built in animation timeline, so you can create cutout animations (like a basic Spriter) or animate any object property on the timeline to be triggered with a script. Also has a 2d and 3d physics system that was created by the devs and is not box2d or Bullet based. The particle system can be previewed realtime in the layout, which is very cool. Unlike Unity, scripting is done in the IDE/GUI itself which I find appealing, but others may not.

As far as I know , there are no library dependencies in the program, which means it is very light . The GDScript is interpreted on the fly, so there is no compiling, yet it is still very fast as it is written in c++. It is very nice to hit play and instantly play the game you are working on. It can export natively to Win, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS, BB, HTML and others (the devs used it for PS3, Wii, Vita, 3DS, but these are not avaialable publicly for obvious reasons).

There are a few rough spots, but since it is FOSS, it will grow in leaps and bounds. It has been developed for 5/6 years and used on commercial games as an inhouse tool up until now. So anyway, if you are looking for a hybrid 2d/3d engine that may eventually give Unity a run for its money, check it out. Oh yeah, it is available on Win/Mac/Linux

http://www.godotengine.org/wp/

I did have some interest in trying out the new Stencyl and had been waiting a LONG time for it to come out. Mainly interested in it since it now has the OpenFL/Haxe backend , which potentially should give it excellent performance. However after just trying the new demo, I have totally lost interest!

Try opening up the basic platformer (2 sprites and one level) and compile it to a Windows .exe. It takes forever for such a simple game. Imagine trying to create a game and the continual waits every time you need to test your game. It would drive me nuts. And to compound this, having a subscription fee is ludicrous for a lone developer. Bad enough Adobe having only a subscription scheme, but for a one-man-band? Add to that, the Scratch "inspired" visual scripting and I have been turned off forever. C2 runs rings around this if you are after a visual coding approach.

Which is a good thing, since I have my hands full with projects in C2 , GMS and currently learning the new Godot Engine (which I was going to start a thread here about, as no one seems to have mentioned it here yet). Too many engines often lead to too many choices...you need to pick your weapons and stick to them

Ashley, I am excited to hear about upcoming physics speedups, as I have a few physics based games that run very slow on intel GPU(HD3000/HD4000) based laptops.

Are there any other areas of C2 that can potentially benefit from asm.js, such as collision detection?

I think that onion skinning is low down on the list of priorities for the image editor. The image editor/animation editor is the weakest part of C2 now and is in need of some love <img src="smileys/smiley27.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

It needs to be streamlined and a more elegant gui created for it. Curently there can be up to 5 floating windows depending on what is selected. This is incongruent with the rest of the C2 interface which is a non-blocking UI.

If the image editor/animation editor had a mini timeline with play/scrubbing/transport controls with integrated animation list and preview it would be much nicer to work with. My biggest beef with it currently is not being able to marquee select several animation frames to delete or shift around which can be a big pain.

Also replacing animations with a new animation is very clunky. You either have to replace in folder (which I prefer to not do), or delete all frames and re-import, or create a new animation with a dummy name then delete the old one and rename the dummy name with original name. Would be much better to have a replace animation option like you would in After Effects.

I also do my sprites in external programs, but having a more functional sprite editor would make prototyping a more pleasurable experience :)

Very cool artwork paintOholic! I well be very interested to see some of your concept art turn into moving sprites...

Thanks reinhardius, that was very helpful! I have also been working to a base res of 1280 x 720, it seems to be the sweet spot. It is promising to hear that CocoonJS is working that well for 7 parallax layers.

Just one other question, if I may ask...How did you go about doing your 640x360 res for web mobile? Did you scale all your elements manually in C2 to be half the size or something more automated?

cheers...

Haha, very cool idea and I love the graphics and animation! Btw, I am a vegan , but I don't offend easily <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Just played the Win8 version and it is running very smoothly. Did have the occasional hiccup, but it mostly felt 60fps.

Since you have successfully published to IOS/Android and Win8, I was interested to know what you base game resolution was? Were you still getting a good fps on lower end Android devices or having any dramas with CocoonJS?

cheers...

Thanks R0J0hound, that is actually a very elegant solution! Although it means that I have to be very clean in my level naming. If I had 20 levels named 1-20 and then decided to add 2 extra ones in the middle, there is a lot of renaming. Still it is a good option to know <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

The way I have been doing it, is to have a dummy level variable sprite with an instance variable called "next level" . The master event sheet then just calls this variable at the end of a level. The advantage of this is that you don't need a separate event sheet for each level and the level order can be changed in the layout view. I tend to store several level specific variables in this dummy sprite and it works quite well.

I still like the idea of shuffling level order in a list which is how I usually do it in Gamemaker, but I can live with this.

Is anyone else frustrated with the default scrollwheel behaviour?

R0J0hound, I tried the reset dialogs and restarted C2, but it still has the same issues. This is on a Win8 machine, but have found the same thing under Vista on another machine.

This is something that I have noticed in every version of C2 I have used since the end of last year. Have trued this on several PC's and os's. It is several glitches in the color picker in the sprite editor.

The 2 glitches are:

• the RGB and HSL text is actaully on top of the luminance slider which means to the slider actually goes through the text.

• the Green, Blue and Alpha text labels cutout part of the lower colour swatch and these cutouts flicker on and off as the colour parameters are moved.

I would actually prefer to see the same colour picker used in the sprite editor that is used when selecting a background colour in the layer properties....it is far superior! Otherwise please fix this.

Obviously I can't attach a capx file for this bug, so please refer to this image instead:

<img src="http://s14.postimg.org/6dshzbwe9/color_palette_glitches.png" border="0" />