Construct 3 r272

Notes

Work on the new effect compositor continues, and we're pleased to introduce new support for 3D effects! These are a new category of effects that change the effect based on depth, i.e. distance from the camera. A good example of this is fog, which basically fades to a color over distance, and a fog effect is now included. There's also a new Depth stripe effect which also shows what's possible: it can paint stripes over the scene that recede with depth, and may have some interesting creative uses. The fundamental capability that makes this possible is the ability to sample depth in shaders, and this is also available for third-party effect developers to use and will be documented in due course. This will allow others to explore the creative possibilities of depth-processing effects!

Another significant update this release is improved handling of the virtual keyboard (VK) on Android. iOS already handles the VK nicely, just panning the view up slightly if necessary to ensure the input element is in view. On Android this has historically been more awkward as the VK would actually resize the entire view. This could in turn cause the game canvas to scale really small, making it hard to see what's being entered. Now thanks to the Virtual Keyboard API in Chrome 94+ this has been improved to work more like it does on iOS: the game canvas will not be resized, and instead the keyboard will overlay the view and if necessary pan the view up to ensure the input element is visible - a much nicer way to handle the VK.

And as ever there's a batch of bug fixes, including sorting out some more issues with the new effect compositor and the new sub-layers feature.