mef1sto

That looks real good man, I like it a lot

Not Scandinavian. I'd guess French. Yep, good English but there's an accent there.

This too summarizes pretty well how I feel. I'm very close myself to abandoning Construct because of this. After 3+ years of learning and excercising optimization tricks, I still can't feel confident that my game will run hard locked at a given framerate. This is soul crushing when making action packed music games that can't miss a beat.

Just wanted to say that, in the end I didn't abandon Construct because of jank issues. I'm actually more impressed with C2's general performance now after replicating my project in GMS2 I ported it over and stuck with it because:

1) My event code was getting bloated and hard to manage, and with some long-standing bugs I struggled to squash. It was in need of refactoring. So I thought, why not try and port it to GMS2 while I'm at it?

2) Apart from UWP and WiiU, C2 can't deploy to consoles. I know console may be a bit of a long shot anyway, but with GMS the possibility is there at least.

3) The way GMS works is a bit better suited for pixel art games, and for me at least it's faster and easier to handle large amounts of animations in GMS's built-in sprite editor. Huge reason for me to switch right there, as my game has literally thousands of animation frames!

Not gonna lie, it's nice to not have to worry about jank issues anymore. But that was a minor reason for my choice all in all. And C2 definitely has some advantages over GMS. I can see why the jank is extra concerning for your game tho, being rythm-based and all.

Nope, as far as I know effects in general can't be applied to entire projects :/

Easy Just toggle it with events:

system   | set fullscreen scaling to low quality
[/code:3uzl89bq]

Also, you shouldn't really need to run high quality scaling come to think of it. If you set the layout scale to 3 or even 2 then that should be enough fidelity for the shader to render properly. Just remember to increase canvas size to match i.e:

[code:3uzl89bq]
System  |  Set layout scale to 2
System  |  Set canvas size to 400*2 x 224*2
[/code:3uzl89bq]

Hello, I updated the first post with fresh links

I've ported most of my game to Gamemaker so I feel I can speak with some confidence about this. From my observations, Construct builds seem to run about as fast, if not faster than, Gamemaker builds on desktop. C2 definitely outperforms GMS on one of my old laptops, where I get 55-60 fps for the former, and 45-50 fps for the latter. But jank remains an issue. My C2 builds may outperform my GMS builds on slow computers but GMS never does the tug-and-jerk screen update thing. Never ever. It runs smooth or it doesn't. Consistently.

In my opinion, this is a pretty big deal and I urge Scirra to really look into it, not just hand-wave it away whenever the subject comes up. I won't go back to Construct for several reasons so it doesn't affect me either way, but it's a shame for an otherwise great product to be held back by these sorts of things.

That's fair. There's a good possibility that if I'd rebuilt the game from scratch in C2, and gotten rid of all

the trial-and-error gunk that's still left in there from my first go at it, it would run faster.

—:

That's a fine-looking game you got there so far <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

I would be very interested if you could put together a GMS/C2 bunnymark comparison!

Okay, here we go:

GMS2 - no render - 9500 objects - 55 fps

GMS2 - render - 9300 objects - 55 fps

C2 nwjs - no render - 12650 objects - 55 fps

C2 nwjs - render - 10900 objects - 55 fps

This is on an i5 2.67ghz processor, 8 gig ram, intel iris 6100, and windows 8.1. For the no renders I just turned off sprite visibility on both builds.

It seems like C2 outperforms GMS2 by quite a bit on this benchmark. Which makes me wonder why my own game performs significantly better in gms than construct. The game logic is structured about the same, and the gpu load should be more or less identical. Hmm...

Possible culprits: The platform behaviour bogs things down in my game. Or maybe the code refactoring helps performance out in the gms version (things were getting a bit unwieldy in the c2 version).

Anyways, pure speculation! On this benchmark at least, C2 comes out on top.

Here's the GMS2 builds:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/30yeiludx4ast ... d.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dy85n6qv7urkt ... w.zip?dl=0

And the project files if anyone wants to load them up in GMS2 themselves:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/aclujpdr5c27g ... h.rar?dl=0

Ashley

I haven't set up performance benchmarks before. If you could link me to a good benchmark capx, I'd be happy to try and recreate those conditions in GMS to see how they compare.

And just to be clear, this wasn't meant as a stab against Construct or to fire up the whole native debate again or anything Just personal impressions from seeing how my half-ported game performs in GMS on weak computers compared to C2 and nwjs.

Do you think C3 engine is as powerful as GameMaker 2 engine?

I've been using Gamemaker Studio 2 a lot the past couple of weeks so I thought I'd jump in and offer my own perspective on this.

For html5 games... Maybe? Probably? I wouldn't be surprised if it was, seeing as Scirra have been building C2 and C3 around web technology from the get-go.

But if you don't give a monkey's about web and only want to deploy to desktop then no. From my impression C2/C3 doesn't come close to Gamemaker Studio in terms of runtime performance.

If you're more interested in what you can do with the two tools I'd say C2/3 is flexible enough to do pretty much whatever kind of game you want, as long as it's 2D. Gamemaker is better at accommodating people who want to make pixel art games, while Construct has a more pleasant way of scripting game code, namely the events system. But the step-down in difficulty from gml scripting to C2/3 events is pretty marginal imo.

One thing I really like about Construct over Gamemaker is how you can set up collision masks for sprite frames using polygons. Construct can guess the general shape of each sprite frame, then make a polygonal shape for it that you can tweak easily afterwards. Getting Gamemaker collision masks properly set up is a bit of a pain in comparison.

Working on KlangMobile's tutorial level. Slowly coming together.

ErekT Liking the way it's turning out!

Thanks! Klang is looking ace, as always

How did you make the animations? Just drawn frame by frame, or are they rendered 3D models?

They're 2-color 3D model renders retouched as pixel art. Much faster than sketching them out in 2D, and I don't have to worry about frame-by-frame perspective, proportions etc beyond getting the 3D models themselves right.