Jase00's Recent Forum Activity

  • Yep, the order of your function actions matters, and will reliably call them in order.

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  • +1 for theme dark. Commented on there 2 years ago, and still using it to this day. Admittedly I modified it to make it slightly more darker, and sorta borked some colours along the way lol, but it's great as it is.

  • Scalability issues and failure to add features for fear beginners would find it complicated... these are major barriers in my mind to any serious look at construct.

    It's only the marketing - there's lots of advanced features, be it javascript integration, multiplayer, encryption, translation, file system. Plenty of random hidden things, like the touch plugin has pressure sensitivity, worked on my old Note phone!

    Construct is great, so long as you are either making something simple or a prototype. But if you want to practice SOLID, you canʻt. If you code, you know, if you donʻt, you probably wonʻt.

    This would be same for any product, even GDevelop. You get so far until you need to understand loops, arrays, functions, etc. You can still achieve a lot without this, even if it means a beginner ends up copy pasting duplicate event blocks or something.

    Every dev cycle I come back to construct, It has a nice IDE, and making games in it is fun... but each time I leave to finish in unity, frustrated with lack of event reusability, better abstract coding, efficient functions, etc...

    I don't get this, event reusability can be achieved with functions/custom actions/event sheet includes. Functions seem efficient although there's that debate on the whole calling functions by name which is seen as finicky.

    The moment you find yourself creating a tool to edit project files so you can more efficiently delete or copy variables... well...

    This can be done just fine in the editor. It does react badly in one circumstance though, can't recall how but something to do with having multiple same-named local vars in a group or sub events.

    EDIT: Wait I misunderstood, yeah project file editing is basic, can't cut and paste rows in arrays and such so it's not the most powerful.

    Also, and most importantly, if you are visual, but want to write good events, you need to use families... families all have the same icon in the event sheet, so now, that whole visual nature of events goes out the window..

    100% agree and it drives me crazy, especially when you name families like "HUD_Camera", "HUD_Bars" and all you can see in event sheet is "HUD_..." unless you expand the view and such.

  • 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.

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Jase00

Member since 5 Jan, 2012

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