matpow2's Recent Forum Activity

  • Yacht Club Games made Shovel Knight, yep!

    There's a few more details here of how Yacht Club Games are involved in Cyber Shadow, so it might be worth a read:

    yachtclubgames.com/2019/03/cyber-shadow

    In any case, Cyber Shadow did well at PAX East!

    The Nintendo Switch version of the game (which uses Chowdren) was on display, as can be seen here:

    twitter.com/afillari/status/1111323549665542145

  • Cyber Shadow has been announced! It's developed by MekaSkull in C2, and published by Yacht Club Games.

    We (MP2 Games) are porting the game to Switch/XB1/PS4/PC using Chowdren, and so happy to be involved with this game :)

    I've been talking to MekaSkull about Cyber Shadow for a long time, so I'm glad we were finally able to spill the beans!

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    The game will be playable at PAX East at the Yacht Club Games booth, so make sure to check it out!

    MP2 Games is working on other projects as well, so I hope to be able to talk more about those soon!

  • If you are not targeting multiple platforms (and probably consoles as well), then your best bet is probably the standard export options. We are working on games for mobile platforms, but most of those games have seen release on a console first.

    With that said, Chowdren should perform significantly better than the standard runtimes. Mobile platforms are constrained by memory/processing power, which also means they are constrained in terms of how much they can JIT applications. For that reason, I suspect the speedup ratio from the standard runtime to Chowdren will be higher on mobile platforms than on desktop.

  • Tokinsom

    Thanks! Happy our hard work is paying off :)

    Glad we could use KiwiStory as well for our showcase, I'm sure that's one of the sample games that people will recognize.

  • Porting showcase

    Today, I'd like to showcase a few examples of how Chowdren can be used to port Construct 2/3 games. If it wasn't clear, Chowdren now supports the following setups:

    • Construct 2
    • Construct 3 using the Construct 2 runtime
    • Construct 3 using the Construct 3 runtime

    Also, all major platforms are supported:

    • Windows, Mac, Linux
    • Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One
    • Android and (soon) iOS

    Today, we will showcase a few Construct sample applications on a handheld console platform as well as PC.

    All the samples shown have excellent support with Chowdren, both on desktop and consoles.

    Note that the following are NOT announcements of ports of any kind.

    KiwiStory

    This is one of the bundled Construct 3 samples, and uses the Construct 3 runtime. It uses a number of effects, some of which are stacked, e.g. ReplaceColor and Brightness. It is a fairly simple game, but exercises a number of plugins, e.g. Function, Platform, Sin, Bullet, Tiled Background, Sprite Font, Dictionary, Ninepatch, and several native events.

    Handheld console display

    PC video

    WebM

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Mighty Goose

    Thanks to Richard Lems, I was able to test a prototype engine of the game "Mighty Goose" on Chowdren. The game is made using the Construct 3 runtime. Make sure to follow Richard on Twitter as well as Patreon.

    The game makes use of layer-based effects with Outline, and uses Tween, Platform, Bullet, Ninepatch, and other plugins.

    Handheld console display

    PC video

    WebM

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Bunnymark

    This Construct 2 sample application is fairly simple, but exercises the Construct renderer/event system to a large degree.

    Handheld console display

    PC video

    WebM

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Conclusion

    Chowdren has good support for Construct 2/3, and has support for all major desktop and console platforms. I hope I've demonstrated that fact today :)

    If you'd like to see more of Chowdren on consoles, please get in touch. For licensed developers, I will be able to get into technical details and more elaborate demonstrations.

    Today, we only showcased small demonstrations, but we have much larger projects running on Chowdren. Behind the scenes, we are working on ports of several Construct games which haven't been announced yet. In any case, I hope this whet your appetite a bit for things to come, and I look forward to working with more Construct developers soon!

  • macube

    The multiplayer plugin hasn't been ported yet, since none of the Construct games being worked on uses it. Multiplayer is also not straightforward if you're porting to consoles, since consoles have compliance requirements that you need to adhere to, so multiplayer games will need to be considered individually.

    Macbee

    (Long post ahead! This will apply to all users in general)

    Benchmarks and performance

    Chowdren is significantly faster than Construct, but in terms of specific numbers, that depends on your game and events.

    For Clickteam Fusion, the community did several Chowdren benchmarks that tested some specific feature (e.g. time taken for 100k loops, 100k 'set position of object', etc), and even though that gave very impressive results for Chowdren compared to Fusion, such benchmarks are synthetic and do not test larger systems. Even though I could do something similar for Construct, I'd like to be fair to the work Ashley & team are doing.

    In general, here are some pointers:

    • If you are creating a game where event performance is a bottleneck on some systems, it most likely won't be an issue on Chowdren.
    • If you are creating a game where you are otherwise CPU-bound on some systems, it might be better on Chowdren.
    • If you are creating a game where effect performance (especially stacked effects) is a bottleneck on some systems, it might be better on Chowdren.
    • If you are creating a game with few events and a lot of drawcalls, Construct and Chowdren are likely equivalent.

    Specialization

    Even though having good performance out-of-the-box is great, a big advantage of Chowdren is also the possibility of specializing the engine according to your game. For example, we are currently working on finishing the ports of Baba Is You, and we were generating some code like this:

    FrameObject * fixed_test; fixed_test = get_object_from_fixed(LuaObject::get_int(1));
    if (fixed_test == NULL) goto event_end;
    family_1.clear_selection();
    for (ObjectIterator it(family_1); !it.end(); ++it) {
     if (!((*it) == fixed_test)) it.deselect();
    }
    if (!family_1.has_selection()) goto event_end;
    

    If we can make no assumptions about the value of LuaObject::get_int(1), the family loop is necessary. This will slow down the game significantly if family_1 has a large number of objects. However, for Baba Is You, we always pass valid objects to functions, so we can specialize this to

    FrameObject * fixed_test; fixed_test = get_object_from_fixed(LuaObject::get_int(1));
    

    In Chowdren, we allow specialization like this using configuration scripts. Obviously, this requires quite a bit of knowledge in terms of the game and engine, but when you're porting to consoles and the like, having that sort of control is amazing.

    Hope this post didn't contain too much rambling, but explaining performance has been on my mind for a while :)

  • My bad! Here's an updated link.

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  • /Cryptwalker

    Thanks!

    BUGStudio

    Will continue the discussion with you in the email thread, thanks for getting in touch.

  • Thanks!

    I should also note that about 300 new ACES/etc. have been added since the last update.

    The new list can be found here: bpaste.net/show/e51bc5858af4

  • Good news! Chowdren now supports games created with the Construct 3 runtime.

    Some plugins do not work yet, but they should only require a small adjustment to correct for the differences between C2 and C3.

    Here's one of the C3 projects, running in Chowdren (please ignore the missing Spritefont objects):

    Video: https://streamable.com/q1rub

    We're still working exclusively with C2 games, but at least the door for C3 games is open now :)

  • mikehive: Sorry for the delay! We're working on a number of different Construct 2 projects, so it's been a busy week. Replied by mail :)

    For everyone else listening, it might be a good idea to include the following in mails you send to me:

    - Breakdown of the game/your studio (link to a website is fine)

    - Potentially a demo (or even better, a .capx) I can take a look at

    - Is there a publisher involved, or is there a budget for ports?

    - Release schedule/plans

    - Potential target platforms

    I hope that wouldn't be too much work to put together! I'm aware that porting is just one of the things you might be looking into, but it will help me understand if I will have time to put your game on my schedule. Some people send me brilliant examples of the above, which makes it easy to start a discussion without too much back and forth :)

  • BBaller1337

    The timeline for ports depends on our current schedule and other things. Looking through my mails, I don't think I see yours? You can send me another mail and hopefully I'll see it this time. If you didn't already, please be sure to include an introduction of yourself/your game/your current plans, just so I have some key points I can use.

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matpow2

Member since 6 Mar, 2017

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