Yaottabyte

Nice work! I wish I had this at the start of my last game!

—,

I haven't seen this issue on our game, but we aren't running the controller plugin, just the AirConsole plugin. I'll try to do some testing this weekend.

cjbruce First of all, it's a bit peculiar that you create a new thread titled "A Teacher's View", about a day after I created a thread titled "An Educator's Perspective" (). Was it too much to reply to my thread?

Secondly, I believe your thread is a tiny bit misleading. It's one thing to use Construct to develop material, and a different thing altogether to use Construct to teach material. I believe a more accurate title should have been "A Successful Developer's View: ..." MPPlantOfficial's point rings true here. Directly or not, he points out that you're a single person, so obviously it's easy to say it's a bargain.

For example, an entry-level electronics online class of ours successfully deployed a whole bunch of interactive circuit testing and building simulation apps developed using Construct 2. A C2 license was purchased for each developer, and it was a "bargain" because of how many students have successfully used the exported apps. No brainer. Not the same as teaching with Construct.

PS: our town passed a referendum that granted the public school corporation millions of additional dollars in property tax revenue. They used around $2 million of it to buy each student in each of the public high schools in the area iPads for use in the classroom and at home. After a couple years of unanimous animosity from the teachers and the students, they discarded all the iPads at a catastrophic loss. They then switched to paying huge amounts of money to buy each student 2-in-1 Windows laptops. I haven't heard how that is going.

CannedEssence,

First off, let me say I am a huge fan of your post. It was very carefully considered and thoughtfully written. It is what inspired me to write about my own story. I didn't want to post under you thread for two reasons:

1. I didn't want to steal your thunder. You did a very good job of explaining your point of view, and aside from a nod of agreement, there wasn't really anything I could say without detracting from your thread.

2. I wanted to add a slightly different story to the mix.

To say that I am a successful developer is a bit of an overstatement. For me, software development is a hobby, not a vocation - teaching pays all of the bills, and it is what I love to do. I spend 90% of my productive time throughout the week teaching/grading/planning/talking to parents, and the remaining 10% in Construct 2. My point is that Construct 2's greatest strength is that it enables someone like me to develop useful tools for the classroom at a rate that simply would not have been possible in any other way. Over the years I have seen teachers get creative with things like interactive PowerPoints ("Jeopardy") and really cool Excel spreadsheets (i.e. the "Professional Vector League Draft") for use with their students, but this is the first time in my career that I have been able to make full-up HTML5 simulations quickly enough to implement and deploy over the course of a high school unit (typically 2-3 weeks). Construct 2 is a fantastic enabling tool for the classroom, and nothing else comes close to its functionality. Sure, there might be other tools out there that are better for more traditional development purposes, but Construct 2 is the only one that does what it does so well.

I think it is awesome that you guys used a Construct 2-generated circuits simulator with your electronics class. In my opinion, that is a success for Scirra's product as much as any other. I am happy to tell other teachers about this amazing tool for the classroom.

Lastly, I would love to teach an entire class using Construct 2. I think you are absolutely right that we can and should be promoting computational literacy with all of our students. Computer game development happens to be an awesome way to do that. Unfortunately for me and my students, the financial trade-off for putting iPads in the hands of all of the students in our school district was that they removed all of our classroom computers. I love the things that the iPad does well -- the immediacy of filming an event in slow motion, taking a screenshot, and marking it up and doing calculations right on the screenshot, for example. I hate that my students have lost the ability to analyze that motion in Excel on a real computer, or make a computational model of that same motion in Construct 2. Losing our classroom computers is a political battle that I fought and lost, and it is still a pretty bitter pill for me to swallow.

The reason I posted this in the Construct 3 forum and not in "Open Topic" is that I believe that the legacy of Construct 2 is important enough to me that I don't want to see it die. Teachers have a long a history of paying to support things that they believe to make the world a better place. I am happy to pay for Construct 3 if it means that Construct 2 will continue to be supported by the developers, and that the legacy of Construct 2 will live on for as long as possible.

tunepunk,

The artwork in your game is beautiful!

I think you are probably right about doing an isometric view in 3D. The game seems like a really good candidate for it. Just switch the camera to orthogonal mode and you would be all set.

FWIW, 3D models are loaded into memory once, then reused on different layouts. The first load can take a while, so just make sure you have some sort of loading screen with callbacks to keep track of which objects have already loaded.

tunepunk,

I realized I never really answered your question above -- sorry!

Trying to make a 3D game with a 2D layout editor is a pain in the neck. For Robot Rumble I made the mistake of laying everything out in a side view rather than a top-down view. This meant that I had to do a lot of trial and error to figure out how everything would look when my camera was top-down.

In the tutorial I intentionally did a top-down layout for the top-down camera. This way it is a lot easier to manually place items. I recommend setting the (x,y) position and the (x width,y width) size in the editor, then creating an in-game camera that you can move around, and tweaking the z-size and z-position of the objects according to what looks right.

TL:DR

For a top-down game, use a top-down layout in the C2 editor.

For a side-scrolling game, use a side view layout in the C2 editor.

For a 1st-person or 3rd-person game, use a top-down layout in the C2 editor.

QuaziGNRLnose

I just completed a new Q3D tutorial:

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/9456/building-your-first-3d-game-with-the-q3d-plugin

Would you mind taking a look for errors?

ThePakernator - The tutorial is complete!

ThePakernator and —,

The tutorial is halfway done! Here is the link:

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/9456/building-your-first-3d-game-with-the-q3d-plugin

I'm not sure which of these things Construct 2 won't handle. Construct 2 night be a little clunky for things like lists, but other than that I haven't found any standard front-end stuff it just plain won't do. See https://simbucket.com/chemthinkserver/chemthink/index.html for an example of what you are looking to do. It was all done in C2 on the front end with php on the back end.

C2 isn't always the most elegant tool for this type of work, but if it gets the job done quickly and well, then who cares?

Here's the link to the final product for the tutorial:

http://simbucket.com/q3dexample/index.html

I'm still working on the text and pictures. I'll try to get it done tonight...

sebastiangohhy

Sorry -- I wasn't thinking clearly. Nice work!

—

It is true that your model is not rendered in 3D in the editor like in Unity. This makes laying everything out much more difficult than in Unity. This isn't a limitation of either the Q3D plugin or of the Babylon plugin, rather a fact of life when the editor is 2D. You have to be very careful when you lay things out to work around this limitation.

The documentation actually does now exist, is about 100 pages long, and it is very good:

https://www.scirra.com/forum/q3d-v-2-4-3d-physics-skeletal-animation-update_t106677?&hilit=q3d&start=1770

The only major thing missing from the documentation is the custom OIMO.js-based physics system. I'm almost done with a tutorial on making a physics-based racing game. I will post the tutorial shortly.