All points mentioned here are totally valid, however I have another to make...

What C3 needs more than anything, is published games out in the wild.

As someone that's used Construct since the Construct Classic days, I've routinely checked out other engines (as they all have shortcomings, and sometimes C3 hits me with a wall I can't work around), and the FIRST thing I ask myself when investigating any other engines is: what has been made with it?

If I don't recognize the name of at least ONE game listed, generally I move on, not out of spite or anything, but out of a reaction of: it must not a capable tool, or no one else is using it either...

Examples won't get anyone's attention, neither really will demos... only finished and sold games will, I'm afraid.

While not aware of Scirra's financial situation, what would really help to ship games, would be to either offer or partner with a publishing service, especially if its capable of helping devs to completion, be it through direct tool support, project funding, distribution, etc...

If there are few to no visible games in the wild, then the engine isn't visible either... and that sucks, because Construct 3 is awesome.

Is the cost to entry high for young, new, solo devs? As someone in Canada, yes, I have to justify my monthly subscription to my wife every month, as C3 still has yet to bring in any revenue to our household to justify my continued use of it.

Are there features that newcomers will be looking for that aren't in place yet? Of course there are. Whether or not those are in the pipeline or never intended is unknown, but they will be viewed as "currently missing".

Does that mean the tool is no good? Absolutely not, C3 is fantastic. But no one knows about it when there are no tangible and visible projects made with it. MIGHTY GOOSE is probably the most well-known/obvious title that we can all point to, which is a great start, but there needs to be more.

So my point is, whatever can facilitate more finished games of quality and polish, getting out the door, and making a little money, in app-stores, e-shops, Steam, Switch, PlayStation Store, Xbox, whatever, is what NEEDS to happen.

Playback I'm not concerned about, as I prefer to use my own samples for specific games, its purely the reading of midi device input that I'm curious about, so thank you for the link! Not being a JS programmer, and someone that only uses the Event System in C3, I may have my work cut out for me in terms of incorporating this, however its a start for sure!

As for MIDI devices, I have a few kicking around ;) (My primary background is in digital audio lol)

You can't just replace an image in a spritefont, because different languages have different number of letters in the alphabet, and will require different settings for character spacing.

This is why I also wanted a "Set Character Set" action, as obviously you'd need to update that to match the newly imported spritefont image

...I guess I'll just have to focus on English alphabet and Katakana font variants for now... as its not just about representing those languages, but also having differently styled fonts for each...

It just seems odd to me that these features are missing from an image based object... and if not a simple oversight, then is it a technical reason for their absence?

I know I've asked this previously, to no avail, but thought I'd ask again in case anyone else has run into the same problem...

Is there any way to alter the Spritefont image and character set once the program is running... Not sure why these actions have been left out of this object, but given that I not only want to support multiple languages per font (these are styled fonts of my own creation), but also different styles of font in general (also of my own creation), not having these seemingly simple (given that they appear to exist on every other graphics based object...) actions seems a bit silly, unless there's some technical reason for their ommission...

Traditional fonts are 100% out of the question as they all look garbage at the pixel resolution I'm targeting... a given character must fit within an 8x8 pixel tile, with an empty column on the right side, and empty row along the bottom, making the character actually 7x7 pixels...

Thanks in advance, although in the past this usually ends up with the advice of "use normal fonts" or "have a crapload of spritefonts already set up for each language and variation within the layout"... neither of which are helpful options I'm afraid...

Just a quick question, as I've failed to find much online to help point me in the right direction...

My goal is to:

- load a Binary Data object with specific values from an external binary file

- see them displayed as HEX using a text object tp verify they're correct

- write them to a new external binary file

What is the best approach to accomplishing this? I've noticed that simply including the source bin as a project file, requesting it through AJAX, saving it to the Binary Data buffer (UTF-8 Text seems to be the only option?), loading it into a text object (I've made my own decimal to hex conversion function) appears to function as expected, however, when I then try to write the binary data to a new file externally using AJAX, my file nearly doubles in size...

What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance!

(Ideally I'd like to be able to write the bytes directly into the Binary Data object using either %00000000 Binary or #FF Hex... I don't suppose this is coming down the pipe any time soon is it?)

Hey all,

Just wondering if there's a way to set up an Enum. I've created an input handler that reads the input state of 16 different inputs ( replicating a gamepad without being tied to the Gamepad plugin ).

This handler uses a string that stores all 16 states, separated by commas, so when I test an input, I just tokenAt() the index I want for the specific input I want to test. Is there any way to tie these index values to actual string names for readability and convenience?

I'm sure I'll remember the index order of all my inputs eventually... but it'd sure be nice to just type the name of the input I want and have the appropriate value serve as the actual index to be read from.

example:

current = "int( tokenAt( obj_inputHandler.inputState, 0, ", " ) )

desired = "int( tokenAt( obj_inputHandler.inputState, Up, ", " ) )

Is this possible or will have to come up with a workaround?

Thanks in advance,

Brent

Even with the modified plugin, you will still have to add and manage images, character sets and spacing data for each language. In my opinion it's not much different from adding multiple SpriteFont objects to your project.

You can create a simple system which will automatically swap English spritefont for a spritefont in another language in runtime.

I understand what you're describing, but its not the way I'd prefer to do things if possible. My ideal setup would include the features I've mentioned, and then simply loading all of my external SpriteFont image files into project, and then having a textManager array that would contain all the information needed for each font. Then its a single function to swap fonts at any time. Be it different characters that use different fonts, different sections of menus, users choosing to disable styled fonts in place of plain white or black text on the opposing background for clarity, etc.

I've thought of a few workarounds, but my whole purpose for questioning these features being available or not, was to get away from workarounds and start doing things more intentionally. Not having to spend wasted time having to load and manually set each font, which at this point is numbering 30+, in editor, hard setting properties for each one, then in code, spawning potentially 30+ text boxes for each separate element of text, when I could, in theory, have a MUCH simpler system that could hot swap them on the fly, using only a single opbject and its various instances, for the entire project.