I wish I could get rich fast, go back in time and rain money on Scirra when they were still at CC stage. And stop the HTML path to even come to existence. Even consideration.
You guys know the saying "Jack of All Trades - Master of none"? Because that's basically C2 right now.
I would much more prefer to have a pure desktop engine rather then this browser/mobile/desktop octopus. I don't give a flying F if the engine can export to all platforms in existence, if the game runs like shit. Instead, I prefer to have one export platform that runs flawless. Just as it was with very powerful CC.
C2 suffers from the same illness from which the CC had died. Features clusterfrak. Features that had been implemented but never truly done/polished. Instead, new features had been added on top of previous. I don't care how many armwatches I have if none of them shows the correct time. HTML5 might be the future - sure. But we are living in the Present.
And in present day, my game Antumbra (which is basically a modern version of old text games) which is probably the most simple code-wise game in existence had troubles running on various setups. So instead of working on Antumbra 2 or another game - I've spent last 3 weeks of my life debugging people PC's. And in most cases the problem was not in my game or even the user machine (old drivers, trashy reg) but in html5. The users browser and the OS, to put it bluntly. And its not even about browsers that do not support HTML5 because I've blacklisted those. So Antumbra can be played only in IE,FF or Chrome.
And I cannot even point at ONE of them, because the game has some serious problems in various versions of the SAME browser. On one Chrome version the game never loads. On another - runs flawlessly. On one IE version the game runs better then in FF or Chrome. But in another - there is no sound. No audio - at all. And yes - I do have all my audio in both ogg and m4a. Sometimes the game fails to load, other time it freezes, different case - it runs on 10-30fps. And I am pretty sure its not my fault because if a bug exist - it can be replicated. It'll be present on all platforms or at least in scope of one browser. So bug report after bug report, I have to keep on telling people that "I will look into it and fix it ASAP! ", when the truth is - I cant do shit about it, because I have no power over Google or Scirra. I can just sit and watch and pray for a miracle to happened. I will use C2 for Antumbra 2 because I have no time to get familiar with UE4 right now, so I have to go with the engine I know the best. Not the one that might perform the best.
I am not pointing fingers. Just sharing my story.
Sidenote: actually browsers are not that better then mobiles right now. No official plugin for Newgrounds (and the one we have is 3rd party and buggy as hell), Kong plugin is not up to date to say the least, Gamejolt is great but... well, Gamejolt is really not the place to look for money heh. And it's also 3rd party plugin anyway. Sooo...
Mobiles: hardly working beside the most simple design and even then is a Russian roulette
Desktops: forget about Linux and Mac. If you use any other NW then 10.5 you are screwed on Windows too. WinXP is out of the question.
Browsers: Russian Roulette chapter II.
I don't know who I should blame and at this point it doesn't really matter. What matters is the solution that is no where to be found.
Sidenote 2: I would really love to see a true game made by Scirra team. Of course with C2. As a proof. Because in many cases I think they really don't know what are we talking about. So maybe if they would have to walk in our shoes for bit... You know. To gain some perspective, that I think they are lacking.
Sidenote 3: I am not attacking, trolling or hating. I just think something must be done, and instead - we are playing this "ping-pong" discussion and wasting time. Pure whining never solved anything. And neither did excuses. Maybe lets stop talking and get busy, huh?