I guess the last big incentive for me to consider C3 just got nuked. Ah well.

The spritesheeting feature isn't for animation. It's used to pack sprites together to increase performance at runtime. Other engines refer to it as a texture atlas.

When you have hundreds of frames you need to change you'll realize just how big an inconvenience it is to do it on a frame-by-frame basis.

This is grand! Haha I love it Real nice arcade feel.

Are you guys emulating the Yamaha YM2203 sound chip btw? It sounds a lot like it.

I see NWjs v 0.21.1 is available for download, anyone tried it already?

On Windows 7 I get a crash message on exit in preview mode. Exports seem to work fine.

How about a separate, invisible object that follows the player around? Let's just call it FocalPoint. Put the Scroll to behaviour on that and restrict its Y movement when you're close to the underground path. You could do a simple coordinate check or you could have other invisible objects to fence off the FocalPoint object i.e. something like this:

<Event> On Player colliding with CameraWall_Vertical    |
               Else                                      |       FocalPoint.Y = Player.Y
[/code:1x0072qq]
When the player is overlapping one of these barriers the player moves freely but the FocalPoint, with the ScrollTo behaviour attached, doesn't. When the Player is no longer overlapping it, the FocalPoint starts following the Player again.

+1 to all of Prominent's suggestions.

I want spritesheet support- allowing to use a spritesheet instead of individual frames.

Especially this!

And if you are already struggling at the tail end of a dev cycle, you have no choice. Its like Rayek said, you have to be somewhat crazy to hitch your boat to a rental model, unless you are guarenteed to be financially sound. Most indies take a risk, most won't find success, but most also have money issues on their first few projects unless they maintain another job (thus increasing dev cycle time and cost of rented tools...

Once you hitch your wagon to c3, its hitched. I use c2 every now and then to look at and edit old projects, but don't do any real work with it, should I have to pay every month for that??? no way. That's like reading a textbook after buying it and then after a year not being able to reference it unless you pay more.

The word 'serf' springs to mind I know that's probably very unfair towards Tom and Ashley & crew but you know, that's the feel a subscription model brings with it. I think both Scirra and several others who argue for it are missing the point a little. It's not about the money.

Thanks

I mean a separate collision box object for attacking that gets enabled during the animation's hit frame. Here's how it works:

This happens in the main function every loop - resets the attack collision box (AttackBox) and moves it out of reach:

On start of an attack this gets called - sets up the collision box size, offset from the fighter's position, damage and so on:

Called every loop for as long as an attack is in progress - when sprite_animationframe is within hitframe scope I set the collision box position and call another function called Check_Collision:

You can definitely do a fighting game in C2. It takes some work and planning to set up, but it's not all that difficult.

Small video of my own system in action. It's a scaled-down gif so the quality is kinda cack, but you get the idea:

Here's a rough breakdown of how it works.

Setup:

One player controller (green). Two collision boxes to check for obstacles (yellow and orange). And one collision box for attacks (red).

The green controller object has the platform behaviour attached and holds all the instance variables for that fighter. The actual sprite is a separate object pinned to it. All the sprite animations are controlled by instance variables fed to it from the controller object. The attack collision box gets enabled at the hit frame of the animation, for instance between frame 3 and 4, and then gets disabled again right after. A separate function to check distance, collision against the opponent sprite, and damage dealing gets called at that point.

Movement:

I use the platform behaviour as a base, but rolling your own physics calculations might be a better idea. I just didn't want to deal with any more of that stuff than I had to.

Fighters can push each other on moving i.e. if player 1 walks into player 2 then player 1's speed is divided by 2 and player 2 gets pushed at the same speed. Except when up against a wall. I use an extra collision box (the yellow and orange ones) behind each player to check for those situations.

There's some extra event code to deal with jumping scenarios. For instance, should a jumping player land in front of or behind the other player when close? For instance (pseudo-code):

if (player1.x < player2.x + 50 AND player1.x > player2.x - 50)   // are they close enough to do a check?
        if (player1.y > player2.y - 20)                         // is player1 less than 20 units above player2? If so, restrict X movement
                  if (player2.Bool_CantBePushed == TRUE)        // If there's some obstacle behind player2 player1 X speed always becomes zero
                              player1.speed = 0;
                  else                                        // move freely
                              // stop X movement and push player2 away 
                              if ( player1.x < player2.x AND player1.facing = facingRight )
                                         player2.speed = player2.speed + player1.speed;
                                         player1.speed = 0;
                              // increase player1 speed if far enough along to jump over
                              else if ( player1.x >= player2.x AND player1.facing = facingRight )
                                         player1.speed = player1.speed * 1.25;

                  etc...                             
[/code:1vgcq8ek]

That's the broad strokes of it, hope it helps

That might be the 10,000 handles per process kicking in. It's a windows limitation. If that's the case, the reason you're not getting it on export is because export builds packs graphics into atlas textures etc..

C3 is an online service...

Yes. Just like people didn't expect. Or ask for.

Have you ever played world of warcraft? Try subscribe for a while, then stop paying, and start complaining you're locked out of the game, all your character progress is locked, You can't access the game and play with friends anymore.... If anything, people will laugh at you for posting something as silly as that. WoW is an online service with maintenance costs.

I don't play it. Never have never will. In any case, it's a mmorpg game not a software tool. Pretty big difference I think.

[quote:dsrfivg0]

C3 is also an online service with maintenance, server costs etc. You might not like the route they took by making c3 as a webapp, but any other payment model than subscription is gonna be tricky to juggle for something that has monthly upkeep costs, unless you figure out another clever way to monetize, maybe IAP (selling extra features) using ads or intentionally plan to stop supporting c3 once c4 comes out next year.

Yeah. Maybe they should reconsider that feature seeing as its reception so far has been pretty lukewarm.

[quote:dsrfivg0]

You can pretty easily calculate when a costumer cost you more than they payed. If you bought C2 5 years ago and still using it, chances are you're probably costing scirra money by now.

I agree their updates for C2 have been extremely generous.

[quote:dsrfivg0]

Get over it,... it's business 101, income vs expenses.

Yep. Two-way street, that business thing.

[quote:dsrfivg0]

The only surprising thing is that there seem to be so many that doesn't get that. And no one is locking you out if you stop subscribing, you're locking yourself out.

Yes, that's why some will be reluctant to lock themselves in in the first place.

People complain because they like C2 but don't like this direction. And because they waited a long time and expected something different. But that's fair. Scirra are not obligated to change course, and users are not obligated to sign up for C3.

In any case I'm grateful for all I've gotten out of C2 so I hope things work out for them, even if I'm probably not signing up for a sub myself.

That no-choice is the crux of my issue: it's not the price, per se, but it's that fact you don't have a choice once you start subscribing.

Very well put.

I'd just like to add that from a fiscal point of view, at least the way I see it, a subscription model doesn't seem to be able to provide a more stable revenue than regular paid version bumps would. Say, a new release every three or four years. Most of the user base who stuck around for those three-four years would probably upgrade and pay full price again to get the new version. And there'd be no animosity about it or potential mass migration.

Of course you could flip that on its head: If users are willing to pay for new versions at regular intervals why do they have a problem with subscriptions? Functionally it's more or less the same thing! The answer is psychological, and rooted in faulknermano's point. People are willing to pay and pay again as long as they don't feel like they're being strong-armed into it. Which is exactly the kind of taste a subscription model that bars access to your work when it ends will leave in the mouth.

I see a lot of posts like these, and I'm left to wonder: is the issue the subscription model - which I know a lot of people aren't fans of - or the value proposition of C3 with a subscription model? While I'm not especially thrilled with subscriptions, it's a fact of life these days, and my issue mostly lies with the lack of a compelling reason to subscribe to C3, which still just seems like a port of the C2 IDE to the browser with some very minor updates, and that's an issue when asking for more money, more regularly.

For me it's the former. I find it very hard to stomach software subscriptions. Autodesk Maya goes subscription? Fine, I'll use Blender instead. Adobe Photoshop? No prob, Gimp serves me just as well. C3, well... The new workflow improvements look nice, but C2 is already pretty solid in that regard. And C3 doesn't address my main concerns about C2 either, namely performance and portability, so yeah. I would have gladly forked out twice the price of C2 if a one-time payment option was on the table, as C2 has been a real boon for me. But subscription, nah.

Software subscriptions are not a fact of life I'm willing to just lie down and accept, and certainly not in the world of gamedev middleware where alternatives are all around.