Edit 14NOV2021

To everyone using the C3 editor in NWJS, I've tested this on a fresh new VM with Windows 10, and there is definitely a significant random issue when using popup windows or the debugger, so right now, I'd strongly urge everyone to avoid using C3 in NWJS, even from the official source or the third party launcher (which I always used and really adore!) but for now, you will run the risk of C3 suddenly closing with no error, possibly lose unsaved work, and then you need the computer knowledge to find your appdata folder and delete the right folder and waste time setting up C3 again, with the chance that you might need to repeat this process multiple times to get it working again. I recommend, and I believe Scirra also recommends, using C3 in Chrome, and then using the Remote Preview Tool to preview your project in NWJS, even though C3 itself is running in Chrome.

EDIT 2:

I might have found a further clue - Lowering the NWJS version from v55 down to v50, the popups work again. Weirdly, the popups open maximised, I don't believe they used to do that? I'll pinpoint the latest NWJS version and post back, and maybe write a bug report, but at least there is a hopeful workaround!

EDIT 1:

I just tried opening NWJS Construct 3 in a fresh new virtual machine, and did the exact steps to trigger the same issue:

NOTE: Please follow the below steps CAREFULLY if you are a NWJS user, as this may corrupt your "construct3" appdata folder, meaning you will need to reinstall addons and set your settings and themes again.

1. Rename your current appdata folder for c3 to back it up safely! (c:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local (the folder is named "construct3")

1. Open NWJS C3 in r260.

2. Click the cross to close the welcome message.

3. Close the "Start page" to make the project bar appear.

4. Right-click the Properties/Layers/Project bar and choose "Popup Window" option.

5. Silent crash. And it will reoccur every time you open NWJS C3.

6. To fix - Delete the newly-created "construct3" folder, and rename your original construct3 folder back to normal.

Step 3 is the clue - I believe the "Buy now" screen is supposed to hide the project and property bars, yet they display if you close the "Start Page" tab, maybe this is a clue to the bug - baring in mind I triggered this bug mid-way using C3 rather than on startup

If, however, I do the below, it works fine:

1. Open NWJS C3 in r260

2. Click the cross to close the welcome message

3. Open Kiwi Story from start page.

4. You can safely use "Popup Window" on the project bar, properties bar, etc.

5. Close all popup windows.

6. Close the current Kiwi Story project.

7. You will now be on the "Buy now" tab.

8. Click the "Start page" button.

9. Open Kiwi Story.

10. All is working fine with popup windows still.

Original post:

Hey all, hope someone could help me at all, I'm at a loss :(

I use the NWJS version of C3 all the time, as my project fundamentally relies on loading local files and using File/Save popups.

Mysteriously, in the middle of using C3 yesterday, it crashed without warning. Hours of use, suddenly it just crashes (closes silently).

Now I opened C3 again in NWJS, and I am finding that, even with no project open, if I use "open as Popup window" on ANY panel (Properties, Find, etc.), it will silently crash and leave a crash dump in my APPDATA folder for "construct3" (which I have no clue how to open, apparently I need WinDBG?).

I have tested this thoroughly, renaming the old appdata folder and using an older version of C3, and I still get the crashes when using "Open as popup window".

SOMETIMES it works with a fresh C3 in NWJS with no appdata folder. But so far, I can't find a pattern. The only pattern I find is, once it crashes once, it will 100% crash again the next time I open and try to open a popup window.

When testing, I open Kiwi Story, and manage to get the same crash to happen, so it's not related to my project.

I'm HOPING this is a computer issue, and I do not suspect it is C3. I use Avast, and nothing is appearing in my history. Windows Defender has nothing in the logs. Event Viewer has nothing interesting in its logs.

Anyone had anything similar? Any suggestions that may help? I use dual-monitors and use popup windows all the time :(

ACCES-Mathieu , How strange, I can see "Align" when I highlight 2 instances and right-click one of them.

I also finally discovered the "Expand" and "Collapse" groups button in C3 - If you right-click a group, it's within a sub-menu called "Event Sheet" which I didn't even realise existed, so that's good to see! (C2 had it immediately visible when right-clicking a group).

Thanks for feedback piranha305 and dop2000 - I asked, and I received! Yeah even if it's on the forums here (I don't even have social media beyond Reddit, tbh I'd actually make an account just to vote if it was only social media, that's how eager I'd be for some form of influence for C3), and it doesn't need to be "monthly", it could be once a new beta cycle starts and it could gauge what to make in the next beta cycle for 2 months into the future perhaps (of course not at the start of a new beta cycle and then expecting to have the suggestion made within the next few releases).

It's a shame it didn't come to be though when you suggested it a year back.

I think if we do a 6-monthly reset, we could take the top 10 or so ideas at the end of that period, and permanently archive them somewhere, so the fact they got a lot of votes is recorded and isn't lost right away.

I mean, I'm not 100% against the idea, but I guess I don't know exactly what you had in mind - if you archived the top 10 or something, would this be public, or tucked away at Scirra...and wouldn't this build up suddenly over time?

The whole point of this discussion is to figure out how to avoid people inundating us with a mountain of work that is literally impossible to implement. Then people get disappointed that what they suggested isn't being worked on. If people can post unlimited suggestions, we'll be inundated.

With the "monthly poll" idea combined with dop2000's "upvote once on all suggestions" idea, then you don't need to worry about the hundreds of new ideas that only get 6 upvotes, and you don't have to worry about being inundated with a huge amount of suggestions, nor worry as much about disappointing people, because: If the casual C3 user browses the suggestions website, and they know that they can upvote whatever they like, then they'll probably check out "Recent" and will hand out upvotes and comments to whatever they feel is a good idea, and ignore (or downvote?) the ideas that are poorly written, bad, pointless, or even defend Scirra on suggestions that go against Scirra's philosophy (e.g. The community will defend Scirra if someone's trying to attract attention to a "native export" idea - We care about C3 and we understand its mission and we would explain this to anyone trying to scream about native exports).

Once suggestions start reaching a high amount of votes, then it's up to Scirra to set boundaries on what they will acknowledge or not, maybe Scirra would only acknowledge & write a comment on the top 20 suggestions, which doesn't mean Scirra will immediataely work on the suggestion, but Scirra could at least provide feedback, even if a suggestion gets to number 1, Scirra can dish out the facts and say "Sounds great, this is feasable" or "That's impossible I'm afraid, [maybe a quick reason why it's impossible, just to soften the blow]".

I think it needs to be accepted that a fair amount of people will have to be disappointed, it's impossible to cater to all suggestions, but I guess I'm trying to focus on how to make the disappointment lower, as well as change the "reason" for disappointment. If people are competing to get their suggestion noticed, then yes disappointment exists, disappointment will always exist regardless of the solution to this topic, but where now we have people thinking "Does Scirra randomly check up on this website? Or not? Is it alive? Should I even bother?", we could instead have a busy suggestions platform with unlimited upvotes, and people would be thinking "Damn I need to write something well-written and spark discussion on my suggestion to encourage people to vote for it, because if I do, then it will rise and then there's a guarantee that it will be acknowledged by Scirra". This would happen primarily because the suggestion-creator knows the community has unlimited voting power, and would be thinking "The community are upvoting based entirely on how I write my post and the idea itself (and not voting based on "Hmm I only have 1 spare vote to give, I'll use it elsewhere"), so I better write this out well so I attract maximum attention".

This all relies on the suggestions website being a busy website, but I really do think that the consistency of a monthly/bi-monthly poll of 5 highly-rated suggestions (that Scirra picked from the top 10 highest-rated ideas) would surely attract people to the suggestions website. With the existence of these polls, people will know that the suggestions site is alive and thriving, which attracts more visitors, more votes, more participants - I mentioned doing these polls on Social Media; wouldn't this boost Scirra's visibility too when more people engage on your Social Media posts?

The absolute key point about being inundated with a mountain of work: The 5 suggestions that are in the poll will be voted on, and once the poll is over, those 5 suggestions will then be filtered down into one ultimate suggestion, which then Scirra could then work on. All said and done, this leaves Scirra with 1 suggestion to implement into C3 between each poll, and maybe commenting on like 20 suggestions. That's it for Scirra. The rest is the community curating the suggestions and essentially doing most of the admin work with votes and comments. A consistent pipeline like this just sounds really ideal to me, I wish I could articulate why.

I'm hyper-focused and passionate about the poll and "unlimited upvotes" concept, but to comment on the "minor suggestions" thing - I'd say keep this section! Or, can you do "tags" and make it so people can tag things as a "minor suggestion", therefore keeping categories tidy? If Scirra could then browse via "Highest-rated minor suggestions", then this can be another poll at a different rate to monthly (considering they are MINOR, this shouldn't become a huge addition to Scirra's workload), and maybe only acknowledge the top 5 instead, or however Scirra would want to handle the numbers and workload. Keeping in mind that these should still have the strict "This isn't exactly a minor suggestion, sorry" judgement from Scirra - because otherwise it WILL waste your time.

I'll try to make some time next week to go through the suggestions platform and update the status on some of the ideas, starting with the ones with the highest votes (as those are presumably the ones most people care about).

This is greatly appreciated, although I understand the community member's uncertainty with the suggestions platform as of now - I haven't used my votes in over a year, I don't even remember what I voted for (probably my own stuff mostly, how selfish of me D; ), and I would assume there's more people that's done this too.

I think the solution is to figure out how to have fewer ideas that most people care about. Having hundreds of suggestions covering years and years of potential work is indeed getting unmanageable. So, if anyone has any ideas on how to radically reduce the number of ideas, let me know... but I'm pretty sure things like letting people have more votes, and be able to submit more ideas, will just make this much worse.

Oh! How about this: Lets assume the suggestions plaform did not contain years-old votes, or lets just ignore that aspect for now:

Perhaps an occasional poll on social media of the top 5 most-voted ideas (as long as they are approved and would be viable for Scirra to produce, i.e. you won't ever have unrealistic ideas such as "Native export" appear on this poll)? This would give the community more chance to give direct influence to Construct 3.

I would see myself ALWAYS casting a vote on something like this. If something I really care about was never getting voted on, I would be on the forums discussing it more amongst the community, rather than thinking "should I try to convince Scirra/Ashley in a forum post?".

If you had run a poll a few weeks ago with "3D Shapes" and 4 other ideas, then I'm very confident that "3D Shapes" would have amassed loads of votes as it's common knowledge amongst the community that "3D" is a desire from a lot of people. For me who would not be using 3D Shapes, this would have still been a good poll result from my view, because it feels like, as a community, we have made a group decision to influence the future of Construct 3. (Little do we know, that you may have picked 5 things YOU are interested in developing, yet we as a community would feel like WE made the decision. ;) )

It's your software though, you might have a confident idea on what's best to do next for Construct 3 - after all, you made this software and pretty much live and breathe javascript and gamedev, and a lot of us really trust your instinct and decisions when you respond on the forum. I suppose even an occassional "minor ideas" poll where something a bit more smaller (e.g. NOT "3d shapes", but a further improvement to something already existing or something) so that Scirra can work on whatever complicated thing they have in development, but still maintain a sense of "Community has some influence".

But yeah - On a sort of casual note - It always looks like so much work is directed towards yourself Ashley. You have on Construct's homepage that you have 180,000 monthly customers, but you have about 2(?) programmers. I think a lot of us can recognise that you have a LOT of people coming up with all sorts of suggestions and expectations for what Construct 3 should focus on, and it is impressive how much has been produced with such few (very talented) staff. I don't know how you guys do it. Construct 3 itself, the several editors within C3, many plugins that need updating whenever Google/Apple/This/That update something, people eager to have a say in the next features of C3, forum posts etc. I know not ALL of that is on your plate and you have other staff that do great work for Scirra. Yet, you still bust out regular beta updates and such with complex features often. It's impressive to say the least.

I hope the workload gets even a tiny bit lighter for you one day, hopefully more staff is a viable option (it's none of our business how you choose to run Scirra) or even volunteers helping out at some point - I don't know. Maybe some day you can go back to writing occassional blog posts again as a more cathartic bit of work in your day job (assuming you enjoy writing those; Myself and many others enjoyed reading them!) Amazing bit of software though, we can all agree, it's why we are so determined to have influence to C3's next features.