I use surface pros. 3 and 4.

They have replaced my desktops and laptops.

They have more than enough performance with tons to spare for anything construct 2 can produce.

They have astounding but high dpi screens. You can dock them and use like a desktop. Actually you don't even need the dock. Just use with any Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. or u can plug some in.

The tablets themselves have a display port out so you can have very nice dual screen setup where you can instantly test touch. I have the game running on the tab screen with C2 on a 24 in screen plugged into it.

I use live preview over lan for a number of phones and Android tablets... This is fine for checking mobile performance there isn't need to keep making apks)

( have no idea what people are smoking when talking about monthly fees for apk builds)

They also have sd card slot for back up.

You can use them with all your regular windows programs.

Of course the one thing that really sets them apart is the superb stylus and it's uses.

I have rediscovered my love of drawing and painting with these wonderful devices and if pixel art is your thing then you need one now.

Also I have "discovered" that to work out real maths you need to write it down with a pen. Again here the surface pros have been a revrlation

negatives

1) the surface pro 4 battery gives u about 5 hours regular non gaming use. Don't take notice of the 9 hour claim on ms site. The sp3 is better at about 8 hours. However the sp4 is thinner which I have found myself liking.

2) once you've worked with microsoft edge ( which is still new and a little buggy) browser you will see what a bloated laggy mess chrome is and never want to touch it again. But it looks like for now Scirra C3 will be on chrome.

Many normal windows programs including c2 are not optimised for touch or stylus.

I'm not sure about developing full time on a tablet or even laptop. To properly work with C2 and mostly likely C3 you need a large screen end of story. however I don't think you can beat the surface pros in the tablet department. And As said previously kick out the stand, plug in a 24 in monitor and you have the best Dev setup you could ask for.

These are not really issues for me but just FYI.

Personally I think these devices with the stylus capabilities should be mandatory for all 2d ga me devs but that's just me.

I picked the i3 pro 3 up for about 300 quid on eBay refurbished with a brand new screen as a test.

Picked up a new i5 sp4 over Christmas for 845 with a free xbox one s. Look out for deals like this if going new.

The sp4 is a tad more responsive but really They are each as good as the other.

And when ur done coding you have a nice tablet to watch films on in bed....

Ive started over a few times myself after various light bulb moments it is an absolute pain but I see it as part of the learning process for noob game devs

I'm assuming at some stage I will be like "hey yea I know how to make that game from end to end" rather than like at present, "how do I do this" "what happens if I try this" .

at least you have a working decent game out with your awesome dark pac man game and a demo of Megaquest. I have nothing that resembles a game right now even after 6 months! (I'm getting close to a shmup tech demo tho).

I'm not the expert in arrays. so far Ive used two small ones in my game, one for a ray cast check and another just to average out the speed of a touch swipe. both are rather small simple uses of array but I am getting the hang of it. I reckon in a about a week I will be starting the editor aspect of my shmup. this is where I am going to have to start looking at really using arrays with json files and exporting and importing json text for the enemy patterns from editor to game. This is what we were talking about previously for your game maps. It will be a big learning exercise for me and I cant guarantee that I will get it but if I do ill be happy to help out if you haven't figured it out by then or someone else hasn't stepped in....I think the best thing would be to do a simple test first to see if it actually will solve your performance issues.

later...

and happy birthday by the looks of it.....

Wow....nice......

The opposite can happen as well. Scirra could become massive or develop some tech that puts them in the crosshairs of the really big fish. A few million later Scirra has been bought out and swallowed up by Valve. Construct 2 / 3 are supported for a year then discontinued. Ashley and Tom have their yachts in the Bahamas and you are left 2-3 years wasted life. It has happened to a least 4 software tools that I had invested years of my life to learning. In fact almost destroyed my career in one instance. It's all part of life. Best not to worry too much about these things.

Yea, i see the same in my games even on desktop.

It is linked to spikes in dt ( usually jumping from 0.0167 to 0.0333)

Has nothing to do with your code or capability of hardware

I believe it is referred to as "jank" in the business

and cannot be solved by using factoring for dt i.e framerate independence.

(as can be attested to the fact you are using sine behaviour in ur capx)

Ive seen some posters and websites link it to "garbage collection"

There is a test website that says that Chrome has VSync issues because of a 96MB GPU memory limit and various other > here http://www.vsynctester.com/chromeisbroken.html and other stuff possible totally unrelated to C2 development that you probably shouldn't read for your own peace of mind.....but I know nothing about these things

certainly this test http://www.vsynctester.com/gputest.html runs janky in Chrome even on my desktop and super duper janky on my phone usually ending in the aw snap crash ....but runs silky smooth with edge browser on surface pro tab and desktop....

they say that not using hardware acceleration i.e. disabling web gl will solve the issue in chrome but then I suppose you loose performance in other ways.

disabling web gl on your capx resulted in smooth scrolling in chrome but will prob result in an overall FPS hit on mobile for bigger games ..

What worries me is that Looking through the chromium devs emails (linked through from above)

it is clear that

1. They are very disorganised and work very slowly

2. There are tons of open issues related to vsync , jank, framerate stuttering

3. They dont really know how to solve them due to complex relationships between browser, os and hardware.

4. These bugs are considered very low priority so dont get much attention

I'm not sure I have seen the Scirra devs comment directly on it.

Ashley

Tom

any chance you could comment

I am assuming you are 10 years old ?

It is a very good lesson to learn early in your life.

Yes very smooth. No lag. No jank. 20/30 %cpu 60fps. On i5 , integrated graphics, 8gb ram.

+ Looks good

+ Looks fun (I wanna play)

+ Looks challenging (I like a challenge)

• control terrible, totally non responsive to my input. jump only one in 5 times, move only one in five times

this type of game needs extremely responsive and accurate controls

also maybe zoom the camera in a little then you can make camera more dynamic with zoom pan and shake.

sort these two things out and you have a winner.

[edit] I notice previous feedbacks say the control is tight so maybe something going wrong for me...I am using edge....let me try chrome be back in a bit.....

[edit] OK no problem in chrome !!!! control fine.... but edge cannot handle your game input... strange.... I have been testing my game in edge for months and never had any such issues.... are you using some special plug ins that only work in chrome ????

so update ....game cool.....only in chrome tho......

I am not expert and I have not released any games

But from my own tests I have found that for-loops that move sets of sprites are the biggest slow down.

The profile debugger tab (I think it is profile?) is good for seeing where the cpu load is going.

pure logic for-loops are fast and moving individual sprites is fast

but something like

for each of (20 sprite instances) move to (calculate move to point) etc etc

seems to take a big chunk of CPU and can cause slow down (on mobile at least).

However, whatever I do on whatever platform, on whatever game, I still always get jank during the first 30 seconds after launching though it does go away after .....(if anyone has any ideas on eliminating this I am all ears...)

If you don't want to code the movement then

I think you could use Bullet behaviour.

just set the angle towards the end position

and set speed to zero once arrived.

Cant try it as I am at work but I think it should be OK.

[edit]: sorry just saw you cant use behaviours..... you will have to code it then.

I suppose the school want you to use / learn trigonometry / Pythagoras for the angles and distances

I'm very much looking forward into styling C3 - there's a few caveats that the above trick wont work on (really anything without defined size properties).

An accessibility theme is already on my to-do list; I'll add left hand version now!

What! Are you a Scirra dev? or doing this for the greater good of humanity ? (and/ profit?)

Either way this would be life changing for us lefties.

I salute you sir.........

> Great question and something we haven't actually considered! Just had a quick look online, and seems like it's not possible in CSS to position scrollbars to the left of the container.

>

> I think there would be some aspects of the UI you could change to be more left hand friendly when it's released with CSS.

>

Not an intended possibility, but changing the reading direction swaps the scrollbar to the appropriate side, so from there you just flip the children back to the original:

http://codepen.io/ElliottBear/pen/YNjyoV

Voila - left aligned scrollbars <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

OMG <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_surprised.gif" alt=":o" title="Surprised">

I have never seen scroll bars on the left before !!!!

I think I am going to cry......

(ps I have no idea about CSS or how to implement it but if this is something I can do in C3 please when you have the time, a little tutorial pretty please....)

I am still in a daze after seeing that......... <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_eek.gif" alt=":shock:" title="Shocked">