Ashley's Forum Posts

  • FPS isn't a linear measure of performance - it's 1 divided by the average delta time, and that's a curve. (A 10fps hit at 20fps is a 50% decrease in FPS, and a 10fps hit at 1000fps is a 1% decrease in FPS.) It might be better to compare performance in terms of delta-times.

    I wouldn't bother testing 0.x - the C2 runtime has been designed differently to take in to account shortcomings in the 0.x runtime, and it's dynamically optimised javascript rather than statically optimised C++, so the performance characteristic is likely to be very different. That also means you should check several browsers to be sure!

  • I realised some of the FAQ was out of date, so I've updated it.

  • Have you measured framerates that prove this optimisation is necessary? Without the numbers it's just shooting in the dark and it's hard to tell if the speedup would be at all useful.

    How many objects are you talking? If it's less than, I don't know, a few hundred, then a simple 'is boolean instance variable set' condition will filter out all the ones you don't want every tick relatively efficiently. A single condition operating on a few hundred instances doesn't actually have very much overhead - it should optimise quite well, even in javascript.

  • It's good to think of the small things! I'm always interested in little changes and tweaks, because often it's the little things that people like about software.

    Comments should always be attached to an event, condition, or action.

    This is an interesting idea - but it seems it might prevent stacking two comments on top of each other. Is that an acceptable side effect?

    [quote:37i0uljt]At private variables, the text "a private variable" is a perfect place to put a description of your choice on what the variable does.

    Where do you mean?

    I like the idea of adding comments to instance variables, to help organise and describe them. I might try and put this in a future build.

    [quote:37i0uljt]System: Create, should have options for size and angle.

    I don't actually think this is such a good idea, because not all objects have a size and an angle, and it's confusing to display options that have no effect. IMO I don't think it's such a bother to just follow with two actions. Also, the Sprite 'spawn' action takes care of angle for you.

    From what I heard the menus system is half done and Id like to see it finished

    If I understand you correctly, you mean the application menus in 0.x? I can't see how that's applicable to the HTML5 runtime in C2.

    the ability to group several layouts in a folder simply for better organisation

    You can, since the very first C2 public preview! Have you tried it?

  • You have to be logged in to see profiles AFAIK, so search engine bots won't see them anyway.

  • To be honest a Linux editor would be unlikely even if we were open source - we're still using MFC which is a Windows-only UI library due to our experience with it, and it's a huge amount of work (100,000 lines of code or more). It is unlikely open source projects would start to port such a large application when it is still very much niche - there were no attempts with Construct 0.x, and that's been downloaded over a quarter of a million times. Also, you should try to appreciate that we're a very small operation (2-3 people) and we just can't afford to double or triple our workload for the sake of 1% of the market. If we were huge and profitable, we might consider it. But we're not, so we have to target the biggest return-on-investment, which is probably Windows.

    A linux port isn't impossible: the project file format is open XML, and is pretty easy to understand. Nothing's stopping an open source project from starting to produce a linux editor that loads and saves projects in the same format. However, I doubt you'll see one, because there are no open source developers interested in doing that. So it's not impossible, but we can't afford to do it right now, and being closed source or commercial has not really affected the situation either.

  • Yes, I pruned a lot of accounts signed up by spambots - there were literally hundreds, it was a big problem until we changed the captcha.

  • No, I don't think that's ever happened. I've read a lot about spammers that literally target random IP addresses looking for servers - it's pretty much a fact of running a website that you'll get automated (or even human-powered) spam being posted. So really it just needs to be reported and cleaned up.

  • Some spammers actually hire real people en-masse to sign up to random forums and make semi-relevant sounding posts by skimming the content of the thread above. So there's a small amount of spam that will always have to be cleaned up by hand.

  • Don't worry, I decided to sticky this old thread, so I'm responsible for bumping it

    I've since put in a new captcha where you have to choose an image that matches. It's not bulletproof, but maybe at least for the fact it's different, it seems to have stopped a lot of the spam.

  • iPhone has an artificial speed limitation for HTML 5 apps in the browser, so that HTML5 applications bought from the App store perform better and Apple can control what users run on their iPhone.

    I've read this is actually due to the security architecture of iOS. The Safari browser got a speed boost by compiling to machine code, but for security reasons this didn't make it to HTML5 apps outside of Safari (e.g. those embedded to native apps). So nothing's been throttled, only a partial optimisation applied. I don't think it's Apple deliberately strangling HTML5 apps. In a future update, hopefully the same speed boost will be applied to the rest of iOS.

  • I think while the devices might be a bit slow today, it's inevitable in future support will improve and speed up. We'll probably see javascript engines as fast as Chrome's V8 (compile-to-machine-code speed) appearing for mobile & tablet, and a lot of these devices have mobile GPUs built in as well, so they only need a software update to get hardware accelerated canvases.

  • What browser does the Wii have? I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't run HTML5 yet.

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  • I've read FF4 uses DirectX 9 on XP, and Chrome is hardware-accelerated with OpenGL on XP, so it is perfectly possible to write hardware-accelerated apps for XP (just think of all the 3D games that have been released for it anyway )