Ashley's Forum Posts

  • For the record this was announced about a year ago in the blog post Sunsetting Construct 2.

  • If a build fails due to the use of a third-party addon, you'll have to contact the addon developer for support on that.

    If a build fails without using any third-party addon, please file an issue following all the guidelines.

  • New JavaScript features must be supported by all of the browser, the editor JavaScript parser, and Closure Compiler, to work everywhere. New features can take several months to appear in all three places. Sooner or later we'll update Closure Compiler and it will start working. This process will probably repeat for other new JavaScript features in future.

  • We've already contacted Sony and Nintendo, more than once, to no avail.

    That's why I say it's probably more likely they will act on it if they see there are lots of potential developers who are asking for it.

  • There wasn't previously any scripting API that covered this. I've added IWorldInstance.getMeshSize() for the next beta.

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  • Apologies for the trouble - see this forum thread for updates.

  • Apologies for the trouble - see this forum thread for updates.

  • Apologies for the inconvenience everyone. We identified this as a significant problem earlier today and I've been posting updates in this thread including some possible workarounds. In order to keep updates in one place I'll update that thread with further news so please keep an eye there.

    In order to mitigate the problem, today's r234.2 release switched to a new developer account for accessing Google Drive. Unfortunately before this can return to being fully operational it must be approved by Google. This could take several days - I don't really know how long, but I've tried to emphasise the urgency of this in our submission to Google. I think at this point we just have to wait and see. Hopefully you can find a workaround in the mean time. Sorry again for the trouble.

  • It's true that worker mode is not supported in Android apps, but you can do a quick test to work out if it's relevant: disable worker mode and try it in the Chrome browser. If it's still better, worker mode is most likely not relevant. If it causes the same performance issue in the Chrome browser, that's actually quite good news since it suggests supporting worker mode in Android apps could improve the situation.

    I think filing issues as I described is still the right way to approach this: the more issues filed by the more users, the clearer it is to Google that it's a significant problem that ought to be prioritised. It also increases the chance one of these reports hits on a discovery that helps get to the bottom of the problem.

    People have long tried to suggest "make a native engine" as a solution to every HTML5 problem, but apart from the fact it is probably infeasible anyway, it may well not actually solve the problem - lots of other tools with native engines have users who make similar complaints about poor performance on Android, like here, here and here. Android graphics drivers are notoriously poor. If that's the cause of most of these types of problems, writing native code does not save you from that.

    Trusted Web Activities (TWAs) are interesting, and you can probably try them today with an existing HTML5 export. The big problem though is they are not Cordova, so you lose IAP, ads, and all other third-party addons that involve a Cordova plugin. There's a Digital Goods API that may allow for IAP only, but you still need a full web export, hosting, and a lot of configuration with the Play Store. Do you think that's viable? We could try to support it better if that level of mobile support would do.

  • We notified third-party developers about the change back in November, so there's been over two months for addon developers to respond. The changes required are minimal, as noted in that thread. It should not take long for an active developer to release a small update.

    I've long worried about such maintenance issues caused by third-party addons, which is one of the reasons why when you install an addon the confirmation dialog has the following warning - emphasis added:

    Only install addons from sources you trust. Malicious addons could compromise the security or privacy of your projects. Broken addons can also cause bugs or other problems in Construct 3, including corrupting your project. Check the addon developer is actively maintaining their addon and providing support for it in case of any problems caused by the addon.

    I'm not sure what more we could reasonably do - I don't want to end up having to hold off making improvements to Construct that benefit all users, because a small number of users are using broken and abandoned addons. I don't think there are any good options really, and in some ways I would rather cause some short-term pain with the breakage if that's what it takes to make people realise this is what third-party addons can do to their project, and why they need to look for active developers who are willing to maintain their addons.

  • I think we hit a rate limit for unverified apps, which may mean it's not accessible until Google verify the app again. I'm afraid you'll have to use a workaround until then. I've updated the original post with the latest status and some advice on workarounds.

  • That is the warning I referred to possibly happening in the 3pm update in the original post. It is possible to continue if you click "Advanced" and then "Go to construct.net" - it should work normally again after that.

  • Update Feb 10th 12:45 GMT: We finally had our verification granted this morning. Google Drive should now be working normally once again. We have also released a r234.4 update that mainly just removes the outage notification prompt when attempting to use Google Drive. Once again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused. We have taken steps to make sure this never happens again.

    Update Feb 9th 9:30am GMT: We had a third response back from Google about verification overnight. They have requested more information again, and we responded providing it. We have repeatedly emphasised that we were previously fully verified and are re-applying with a new developer account, but unfortunately they are making us jump through some hoops anyway.

    Update Feb 7th 1pm GMT: We had a second response back from Google about verification. They requested some more information, and we are responding.

    Update Feb 5th 2pm GMT: We have had our first response back from Google about verification. They requested a small change to our configuration, which we made promptly and then responded indicating we were ready again. If they continue to respond quickly, hopefully we can get verification within the next few days, although I can't promise an exact time scale since it's out of our hands.

    Update 4:08pm GMT: We're aware of an outage affecting the Google Drive cloud save feature. We have published an update to Construct with r234.2 to attempt to mitigate it, but there may continue to be problems until Google approve our new developer account.

    In the mean time some of the following workarounds may help:

    • You can still access your Google Drive files from the web interface at drive.google.com. You can download your project files from there to your local device, and then open them as local files. When you have finished, you can use the same web interface to upload them again.
    • If you have a Microsoft account or Dropbox account, the Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox cloud save features are still operational.
    • In the Chrome browser Construct can also open and save directly to local files, which may be a more convenient workflow in the interim.

    We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience. Our team are working to ensure this can be resolved as soon as possible. We will post updates when we have them in this thread.

    Update 3pm GMT: we have now released r234.2 which should address the problem. However we have had to set up a new developer account for using Google Drive in Construct. Normally apps are verified by Google which they say could take several days. Therefore it's possible you will see warnings such as "unverified app" for a while when using Google Drive cloud saves in Construct. Hopefully verification will be completed soon and these warnings will disappear.

    If you encounter any further problems with Google Drive, you can still access your project files by signing in to Google Drive on the web, downloading your project files, and continuing to work with them locally. Once you have finished, you can then upload your project files back to Google Drive with the web interface again.

    Original message: We're aware of an issue affecting the use of cloud save with Google Drive in Construct. We're currently investigating. We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed ASAP.

    At this time it's not clear what has gone wrong but it does not look like it was related to our r234 update, since the previous r225 release is also affected - the timing is merely coincidental. We'll post updates when we have them.

  • You probably added something to your project that made it exceed the free edition limits (as shown in the table here). If you share the project I can probably identify which limit you exceeded, e.g. if it's the event limit, effects limit, layers limit etc.

    We haven't changed anything about the free edition limits recently. In particular:

    Everything was fine, I could even export the game to windows

    I'm not sure what you've been doing, because the Windows desktop export (with NW.js) has never been available in the free edition. Perhaps you were using the free gamejam license over the weekend? We made the full version free temporarily for Global Game Jam 2021.

  • As far as I'm aware the vast majority of Android devices perform just fine with the WebView. I think it's an overreaction to point at threads like this and say performance is poor everywhere.

    As noted threads like this that appear to show a performance difference between Chrome and WebView on certain devices occasionally crop up. Unfortunately the exact reason why has remained a mystery. We can't really investigate it because it's most likely something to do with either the Chromium browser engine or the device GPU drivers (or both), which are out of our control. Our engine is also running more or less identical code in both cases, so there's not much we can directly do.

    As I've mentioned in other threads, your best bet is to make as simple and obvious a reproduction case as you possibly can (e.g. just one intensive layout that has a clear FPS/jank difference between Chrome and WebView), and file an issue at crbug.com with that including the full device specs. I think only they are in a position to investigate this kind of thing. Then Google can investigate and hopefully work out what's going on. You can post the issue here and I'll star it and answer any Construct-specific questions the Google engineers have.

    I'd also add you should respond to any questions the Google engineers pose and try any variations they request. One of the reasons this has remained a mystery is sometimes people file an issue, and then stop responding to any questions, so the Google engineers get stuck and also can't investigate it any further. If you really want to get to the bottom of this, you have to be patient, co-operate, and work with them until they can complete a thorough investigation that gets to the bottom of the real issue.