Rory's Forum Posts

  • This may not be the best workaround, but you can try using billinear filtering and then applying about a 20% sharpen on the pixel art layers or the entire game.

  • I fully understand your issue because I went through all what you went through above.

    I just gave up on crisp but filtered pixel art.

    I think you may be on to something with the integer letterbox scale, to try to get rid of the black bars, try changing canvas size on runtime each time you change the fullscreen mode.

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    Restart life in a wizard school! An Action RPG with a large focus on mystery solving, puzzles and a combat system based around drawing spell signs with your wand!

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  • aekiro.itch.io/proui

    This makes it and a lot of UI things a lot easier.

    As much as I bug Scirra to make prefabs. I don't find anything I can't do with Construct 3 within the scope of what they claim the engine does. Make 2D games.

    Plugins fill in most of the gaps. Chowdren is a way to get any game worth porting ported to switch.

    For the amount of convenience the engine provides - well worth the slight hassles.

  • You can't, use Aekiro's Game Object plugin instead :)

  • This is currently doable with Aekiro's gameobject plugin :)

  • Oh, it's a part of ProUI, I though it was a different plugin. If this is mainly for UI controls, then I guess my questions are irrelevant.

    I've bought it, it's actually really good at what you wanted it to do. It's sort of like Prefabs.

    The author mainly uses it for UI, but besides some limitations with other behaviors like physics and some platforming issues, there's nothing really stopping you from using it to compose objects!

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    All this discussion about the limitations of the free version and what it should or should not include, comes across to me as quite irrelevant if not even outright irritating.

    A free version of a commercial product is by definition limited. When you list all the benefits of the free edition, I feel that the kind folks at Scirra are being amazingly generous.

    If you want more, then for an attractive and reasonable yearly subscription you get a very advanced game engine providing hours of fun and late night entertainment.

    The pleasure and satisfaction outweighs a million fold any downsides to paying a meager amount of money.

    Nobody is trying to say Scirra is being selfish or not generous. We're saying there should be a better balance of what is allowed to be tested in the free tier so that more people can understand that power. I'm sure as a paid user yourself, you have not been using the free version for awhile so it's hard for you to feel what the engine looks like without the majority of its features and with only 25 events.

    Anyway, Tom and scirra have addressed our concerns through discord and we now have a monthly paid plan for people who want to try the engine without sinking in $99 to test the engines full feature set. So it's all good.

    There will always be a balance to be struck. There will always be people who will not understand fully what the engine is capable of because they won't sink any money at all into a monthly subscription to test.

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/construct-right-me-150039

    But it's a balance, and Scirra is balancing.

    Rory

    > I see very little reason why being a small company would stop Scirra from making their free tier more appealing. I'm no business expert but I've been running a F2P MMORPG for 7 years now and if the free to play model has taught me anything is that if you get people invested into your product in time, they're more likely to spend money on it.

    >

    they need capitol to run day-to-day. they simply can't afford that.

    I think you are looking at it like how Unreal and Unity are free. But you may not realize that those companies are huge with lots of other income.

    If somehow Jeff Bezos gave Scirra some 10s of million dollars, then sure they could easily make it a free engine. After a few years, and with proper marketing and dev successes Construct would be a serious "contender" in the 3rd party game engine world. And they would eventually see returns from many more people using it which would carry the cost of the casual user. Although this is a big "if", you can't really count on a plan like that. Having used all the major engines I do think Construct is special and there is definitely something there, but its a huge gamble that I doubt they are willing to risk. and doesn't seem currently viable.

    Although I think Google would be smart to buy Scirra - and keep them autonomous - and sink in some serious capitol... now that would be great. but who knows, maybe ashley doesn't even want that.

    I think you’re missing my point, I’m talking about optimising the free tier to be a better introduction to Construct 3 with the sole intention of better conversion rates from free to paid users. Because as it is, the free tier makes Construct 3 look and feel like a toy and most people won’t pay $99USD to unlock those features that make it powerful, like feeling the power of > 25 events and 2 layers to try an engine. Especially not in modern times now with free alternatives.

    But this is a pointless discussion now. As Tom has said, there is probably room for optimisation but they are happy with the growth for now.

    I see. But is there reason to believe that those users would've paid 99 dollars to use it to any greater capacity if the engine was more limited for free users then?

    Isn't it better if there is more people generally using the engine free or paid. If there is a chance those free users will eventually decide they need to use more advanced features then if they never got into the ecosystem at all.

    I think a majority of those users that are using it for fun were never going to pay that money to use the engine for fun, and even more so now with more choices of free engines. And that back then a benefit of just having more people in the ecosystem free or paid was a good thing, having more games and numbers will give more confidence, and just having a way for people to try the full version of C3 without being limited to 25 events would help people see that the engine is capable of a lot more than c2 was or c3 was at launch.

    I see very little reason why being a small company would stop Scirra from making their free tier more appealing. I'm no business expert but I've been running a F2P MMORPG for 7 years now and if the free to play model has taught me anything is that if you get people invested into your product in time, they're more likely to spend money on it. It's not like people who barely know the engines capabilities will fork out 99 dollars a year to try the engine. They're gonna rely on what they've experienced on the free edition to make that decision. And if they see that the free edition is a toy, they're not going to spend 99 dollars for it.

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    I'd like to add to this that I feel that it's a fine balance to be made, but that right now the limits were from a time where on top of the events system and layers system, Construct 3 did not have much to offer. So limiting that heavily was good, but now that the engine is so much more capable, I think that holding back on more extensibility features like Plugins, Timelines and JavaScript is already a major incentive to subscribe.

    The balance weighs between limiting too little and having people develop a large portion of any game while off subscription. But on the other hand, limiting too much and having new users not invest any time into trying what real development feels like with C3 and also potentially making the engine look like a Toy.

    I say this because it's truly hard for me to explain how powerful c3s event system is when seeing only the demos and 25 events. 25 events and 2 layers is very fine for maybe making a mario clone, but its hard to demonstrate that the engine is more than that with those limits.

    I think atleast a few hundred events and just not having a limit on layers would be a good move because any game within a 1 year development scope is already forced to subscribe for a year. So no matter how simple a game is, for publishing they would subscribe for a year in minimum already. And for extended projects, for example 5 years, a 500 event limit or 1000 event limit would be hit by the first month or so, so as long as it isn't 1 year of free development, it's no revenue lost for the most part.

    I think this conversation we had on discord, we also were discussing how Global Game Jam and game jams in general would be less in favour of C3 at the moment because while other engines have a comprehensive free engine for people to be learning, tinkering with, prototyping and generally using all year round, C3 only is fully available during select jams and so it's less likely people will be atleast a certain familiarity with the engine when that time of the year comes.

    As with OP: I am and have been subscribed to Construct 3 for years so it's not about wanting more for free, but over the years I've encountered a few situations where people have responded to me trying to construct 3 as too large an investment to "try". And I think this would be improved with a free version that atleast gets them to a point they can see the benefits, and speed of C3 development.

  • No.

    I want Construct to be an engine not a template.

    It would be great if people made examples of plug-and-play shop systems etc. and shared them, but I hardly think that any feature that is as specific as Shop has no place as a in-built feature.

    You can build that easily with arrays, variables and simple functions.