Jase00's Forum Posts

  • I mean, everyone would rather not pay moneys, but with many hobbies (whether intending to go professional or remain as a hobby), they do often have a lot of costs to execute that hobby, be it materials or tools.

    Being software, from a buyers point-of-view, we have different expectations because "it's just code, can copy/paste software, why charge?" and "but software is always pay once, I wanna own it", and as devs, we have many choices that are absolutely free from costs, so we can draw comparisons between software. But from a companies point-of-view, unless the company is producing many different bits of software, then one sale doesn't seem like it will go far, would constantly need new people rather than commited people. Believe me I'd rather not pay monthly/yearly too, but it seems like a sustainable way for a company with few products to generate an income, thus giving them ability to make more updates and provide more services to us (e.g. Build server, support).

    I vaguely remember I once emailed Scirra asking if they would accept random donations of money, since I felt bad for paying £70 once then using the software for years - I got more hours out of C2 than video games! I wasn't well funded so wouldn't have been a huge donation, but yeah. Now regular payments for sub is like "ehh" BUT, it feels like the money is funding the software, which we do want to see grow and flourish - However, it does boost my expectations when there's issues though, like if editor goes down (as it rarely does, and offline mode often works for me), it instills rage in me like "I PAY YEARLY FOR THIS, IT HAS TO WORK", or a crash bug would be more annoying due to knowing I'm paying a sub. Even chrome being buggy made me internally blame C3 at first, like with the recent "status breakpoint" bug, but then realised I was wrong to assume.

  • Price aside, the free version feels like it could benefit from easing up, just a bit, not enough where someone can make a fully-featured game, but enough that you could get somewhat far and then need to subscribe.

    Events are tricky, I think a limit is a good idea, but maybe a bit higher for logged in users. Sure, you could say "ah then they should learn to utilise loops and such to keep event count down", but maybe people won't think that and just abandon when they hit limits.

    There's an effect limit of 2. Just 2, for the entire project! Gives you a quick taste but doesn't let you make a small effect system, could add blur horiz and blur vert and you've reached the limit. Maybe a change to this, maybe 2 per object, maybe a global limit of 6 - sometimes combining effects is quite important.

    Remote preview is restricted, perhaps this could be unrestricted for logged-in users, as its quite exciting to preview on mobile and such. Could say that people could open on their phone and test, but seeing popup is just another "uhhg" moment if testing on a desktop.

    I guess my thought process is trying to find a way to get people using C3 a lot and getting quite familiar, without hitting restriction popup and such as easily. Then it's like "I've spent few hours and just hit a restriction, I really dig this, let's sub" rather than "ahh man I've hit a restriction multiple times and it's been 20 mins".

    Scirra would have more useful data on all this so I imagine they know whether popups on free version causes the person to quit suddenly or something. But just some thoughts.

    The example page is definitely amazing, even on free version, you can still open anything to see what sorts of things you could make with C3. Maybe a good "tech demo" kinda like kiwi story but does some crazy showcase of everything (physics, effects, etc) kinda like how half life 2 had that map they showed at E3 showing off essentially EVERYTHING that can be done in one small sweet package. The examples definitely do this, maybe even a highlight of the very impressive ones for free users to be easier, but a self-contained project with everything could be great!

    EDIT: Infact, when I open C3, I see first person shooter, cave bridge, and challenge room, none have touch controls and don't say to flip to landscape. Why not have these update to have this? The cave bridge is an excellent demonstration of how beautiful C3 stuff can look! But all in all, if free version always presented a wonderful tech demo example that works on touch, then even people casually browsing on their phones could go into the editor and immediately preview a beautiful professional-looking project.

  • You're welcome! Personal sounds right for you. If you make a bunch of money from your games (something like $50,000), or if you make games as part of a company/business, then you'll have to upgrade to the business licence, but for now, it sounds like personal is the right choice for you.

  • You can see the cost per month (or per year) on the Construct website when you go to purchase it.

    If you paid for 1 month and exported a game to android and uploaded to the android store, then after 1 month, your game will still remain on the android store forever, but your access to features in Construct will go back to the "free" version, meaning you will have restrictions such as limited number of events, and won't be able to export to android until you pay for another month. You can still open your project and test it and make other changes, but will be limited.

  • Thanks for the recommendation! Plenty to read and keep me busy.

  • Unrelated but purely curious, what project reasons do you stick with r225? Perhaps there's good reason and maybe others might need to consider it, but can't think of a reason off top of my head.

    I think one of the recent updates added a UID option that helps with github-related stuff, may be relevant to you.

  • Wow that was an unexpected and extremely useful list! Thank you!! And thank you for the insightful wisdom, it's genuinely appreciated.

  • Maybe resizing the canvas is the best thing to do since it drastically improves performance. It's kinda like playing any game on a low-end device, lower screen resolutions give massive gains (along with disabling anti-aliasing, but that's not relevant here).

    You could try using "set fullscreen quality to Low" and use the system action in events called "set canvas size" so you can halve it or something (though this might mess up UI). But even if it messes up things when halving it, at least you can see if it performs better and is worth designing around different canvas sizes.

  • Ahh I follow, thanks for the input! It probably explains why chatgpt kept saying most math functions can be used for a level up system, which seemed unusual. Like you say, most things can be done in more than one way. I suppose a lot can be achieved with basic operators anyway, and what matters is if the end result looks correct regardless of how it's achieved.

    I haven't touched the different math operators I listed for like 15 years. Maybe I was hopeful something would unlock a whole world of usefulness, much like sin/cos unlocking the world of angles and circles. I have a rough idea what they do, maybe one day I'll come across a use case within game dev.

  • Thanks for ideas. I guess I was curious at the more fundamental "what could it be used for" then work backwards from there. Like E.G. Exp(), we can punch some numbers in and use this and observe it is a value that gets... exponentially higher depending on the value you input, but then what I am curious about, is where in 2D game mechanics might this be used?

    I asked chatgpt (rather not, it's cooler to get ideas from people) and it gave lots of examples but I don't trust if it's true. Some were true, like it said sin/cos can be used for a pendulum motion. But then it said log() and exp() could be good for either a decay system, or an RPG levelling system to set the next goal for experience points to reach. Even if this was true, seems like you could just achieve the same effect with multiplication, is there a situation where its better to use exp/log over multiplaction perhaps? Is there a situation where exp/log must be used to achieve an effect/motion/etc.?

    Why would you use ln(), why would you use unlerp() (I've seen unlerp somewhere once, but can't recall what game mechanic it was for).

    I suppose I ask this because my mind sometimes grasps things better when I imagine a result, then work backwards deconstructing it from there.

  • I was curious what uses there are for different math functions.

    Like take trigonometry, sin() tan() cos(), all very good for getting angles between 2 different positions, and moving objects in a smooth sinewave motion.

    What uses in gamedev are there for log(), or using powers or square roots, etc.? I'm curious to learn!

    Bonus points if it's useful for something unachievable with what C3 already provides (e.g. Sin/cos to move a sprite at an angle is already possible with the "Move At Angle" action, so not best example).

  • Interesting and useful to know, I'll stick to decision to pay for the development of that nwjs node module plugin. It does sound much cleaner with Webview2 overall, hopefully it evolves soon enough.

    Lacking the knowledge of how this all works, don't suppose there's any sort of interactivity between Webview2 and the local machine, similar to how "node modules" provides interactivity beyond the NWJS window?

    The node-module plugin I was hoping to acquire would essentially communicate with a local application that the user would have running in the background (the app coming from an official company).

    Again I lack the knowledge, but lets assume this company provides a C++ API to communicate with their official local app. Could there be a way for C3 Webview2 exports to take advantage of this and allow us to do API calls through C3 events, thus communicating with an application on the user's local machine?

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  • I took a peek at your project - Just a guess from a quick look, but, I think perhaps LocalStorage is being used incorrectly.

    Usually you would use a "Get Wardrobe4" action within your "On Created" event (You can then use "Wait until previous actions" and then set the bee animation, all in 1 event, no need for triggers!)

    Currently, the only "Get Wardrobe4" event is placed within a LocalStorage trigger event. Trigger's will never run unless an action elsewhere prompts the trigger to run

    If you have Discord, I am happy to try and help out, and there is also the community Discord where you might find some assistance too.

    EDIT: On more thinking, if you did use "Wait until previous actions", then that wouldn't take into account "On Exists" failing - Perhaps it's worth setting a default value for LocalStorage at the start of layout, so it will always have a value and will never need to check "On Exists".

  • > Would Electron be a worthy temporary solution until WebView2 is supported on all desktop OS's? Though I guess this would just move us to a bunch of different potential issues, or maybe even the same exact issues as NWJS. Or maybe another alternative altogether, just to tide us by if NWJS is not seeming to resolve major issues?

    I don't understand why you decided to discard this idea. Electron is still the industry leading standard and widely used to distribute desktop apps with many active developers and guaranteed long-term support because of its community.

    Node Modules which the Greenworks addon relies on aren't supported by Webview2 either. I'm not aware of any alternatives besides using the feature incomplete Steam Web API.

    Ashley I'm aware that this could be one of those "grass is greener" situations but has this ever been on the radar for Scirra? Electron is feature complete, supported by Greenworks and has on-par performance with Webview2.

    Very good point, later this year when my finances are better, I was planning to spend money for a 3rd party dev to create a node module addon, they've looked at this and said they can do it, but I did not consider this at all - that I could pay for this but subsequently lose this and all ability to achieve what this plugin could achieve if WebView2 was the only export option. (If nwjs was deprecated but still possible to export to, then, well, I would rather not use it, I want to be up to date and using the most recommended approach that works best - but then no node modules...).

    It's all tricky to think about, my project in particular is over a year in, and heavily relies on NWJS plugin. I could move it all to file system plugin but that's a huge project in itself since the actions/conditions are not one-to-one replacements. I wonder if electron would be pretty much identical to NWJS with it's read/write actions and such.

  • No..

    I don't use any caracter above.

    I've also tried renaming the project without the character. But the result is the same, I can't export the project.

    Although it only seems like a warning but should still export - In the list of forbidden characters, the first character is a space, and your project indeed has 2 spaces in it. Have you tried without any spaces? And when you do try, do you still get this error about using these characters, or a different error?