Thanks! I actually took all what I would like to have in a UI. I'm also looking for feedback on what components and features people look for more often in a UI, so feel free to leave your thoughts.

Smart UI is a framework and a set of addons developed with the purpose to simplify the UI design and build in the game engine Construct 3. The framework is still in development but has already reach a stage where the addons and the design components are fully usable to create functional UI's.

The framework came from the need of upgrading the existing tools and addons from Construct's SDK v1 which has evolved into the SDK v2, introducing breaking changes and forbidding backwards compatibility for the tools developed by the community. Therefore, I decided to develop my own framework, highly integrated with the current SDK and aiming to live for long to keep my game projects running for several years. Compatibility with the SDK v2 is a major challenge, considering that the current state of the SDK is still in development, but with a stable version already rolled out.

As part of this project, I've been reporting multiple bugs that Scirra, who has been resolving them swiftly, allowing me to move on and complete the milestones I've set for these addons, while helping the Construct 3 community to have a more stable SDK in the process.

youtube.com/playlist

If you have questions or suggestion, feel free to drop a message or leave your comment. I'd like to know how many devs would be interested in these addons.

Read the full article here: wp.me/parV9i-s0

No one has ever said anything about older versions ever becoming unaccessible.

I'd better have Ashley to clarify that, it must be an official pronunciation from Scirra, not from the community devs trying to make conclusions. We must have a guarantee that it will work permanently at r388, and that all our old projects will be able to access the internal features to freeze any updates to the lates c3 stable on our side when this goes live.

Here's some quotes of the milestones:

Milestone 4: Construct will remove support for SDK v1 addons. The addons will no longer be loaded in the editor, and projects using them will fail to open and report that the addons are not supported and need updating. This will be at least 6 months after milestone 3 (and so at least 12 months after milestone 2).

Construct will ultimately drop support for the Addon SDK v1, so addon developers should consider starting updating their plugins and behaviors to use the Addon SDK v2.

skymen None of the quotes above indicate that what I state won't happen.

Ashley's comments about LTS.

It's infeasible to keep supporting one version forever. Eventually we will have to stop supporting it. As far as I'm aware nobody else in the industry supports LTS versions forever - everyone has some schedule of eventually retiring old LTS versions and introducing new LTS versions, sometimes with overlap between them. The question is what schedule is being proposed here

Ashley please clarify.

What about all the private addons that were made for ambitious productions ?

This is exactly what Ashley doesn't seem to understand. Theres already games live that had used a private addon to surpass a C3 limitation, those projects may have an income committed, and Scirra is killing them abruptly. I'm sure any addon used by those projects will be kept up to date and won't break "customer's projects", which is the main reason Ashley is giving to deprecatr sdk v1. I have several private addons too that I use in my live games, those games have revenue, killing the sdk v1 will be a catastrophic action because of the simple fact that I can't go to the an older version of construct because sdk v1 will be totally retired. Those projects are expected to live for several years ahead. Using older versions with permanent backwards compatibility is the industry standard, which construct won't provide.

Ashley you are going against what the industry is doing. Look at Unity Hub, I can still access older versions of the engine and keep my games running. Scirra is deciding to unsupport that compatibility? Even when addons like funky quads, which used unsupported features, paved the way for you to introduce 3d capabilities. Scirra is forcing devs to invest time and money on a tool whose reliability and support to the community is in question because of decisions like this. Even when these addons leveraged the popularity of the engine and Scirra got the benefits of it. It feels like a shot in the back. The good will of the community to expand the engine and help your company is being directly aggravated by this.

Do you think caring about our community means allowing customer projects to continue to get ruined over the next few years, and possibly risking some huge disaster, when we know we can take action to prevent that?

You are forgetting the fact that WE are customers, advanced customers, and probably we are the serious ones making money out of construct. You really have no idea of how many projects will break up permanently, this decision won't help us, the CUSTOMERS. I don't see Scirra considering allowing the v1 of the SDK to live forever, why removing it? Improving it is perfectly fine, but removing it?!?! I'm affraid this decision will cause more problems than benefits, even for those addons that didn't hack the SDK. And I'm pretty sure you are not fixing your customers projects, we have done it in a daily basis every time construct breaks. I had had to workaround Construct 3 bugs so many times, much more commonly than by using a 3rd party plugin. My in-house plugins had never broken a project on every c3 release, but the c3 release itself had, even delaying my delivery schedule for months several times because it broke existing functionalities that are c3 features, or because your priorities don't align with the bug fixing. Yeah I've lost money because of this. I perfectly know what I'm talking about, already been in the software industry for over 20 years. Do not neglect that v1 sdk must be kept alive. Investing time and money in the projects and accelerators I've developed for the past 5 years is a huge project. It will only push me to evaluate alternatives where the accelerators and features already exist, where I don't have to develop them again just because sdk v1 will be removed. Some of my addons took me over a year to be properly developed, of course all of that is not public, you are missing that important part: what you don't see in the forums/community.