[1/2] I know there is nothing easier than throwing and writing ideas. As i often say i'm thankful for a bunch of additions you made this year, some of them involved a lot of works and are real gamechangers. I love how fast bugs are handled and I agree that great progress was made this year regarding implementing community suggestions and you managed to prove some of our concerns were wrong. Indeed I had the luck to see some of my suggestions integrated in the engine. (both in the platform, in bug reports, on twitter). So i'm probably not exactly the right person to ask for more and I really don't want to sound ungrateful for your work. I know how much i owe Scirra for my previous and upcoming projects.
Great year for Construct indeed! Loads of amazing improvements. Congrats to the team!
I must admit I was skepticial regarding that long Timeline update cycle we got but it now evolved into a great piece of software. Kudos for that.
My only gripe is regarding the community suggestions. Even if we all know you're a small team, we hoped at some point there would be some updates dedicated to implement a bunch of small easy-to-add suggestions before the platform get rebooted again.
I'm not speaking about big new features, but some easier stuff such as obvious missing ACE, or small improvements on existing stuff.
41 out of 487 suggestions in 18 month feels a bit low, especially as 10 of them are just about exposing existing features to JS. I don't think extrapolating the time it would take to implement the relevant suggestions to 16 years is fair. It mostly means it would take 16 years if you keep them at a very low priority level.
Thanks again for all the updates this year!
Thank you really much for all the fixes/enhancements to the Project View and Animation Editor. This kind of details greatly improve our user experience, it's really pleasant 👌
Stellar update !
Regarding "Properties Bar: suggest string instance variable property values (similar to expression autocomplete)"
It would be amazing if we could right click an element in the list of suggested values to open a context menu
- Right click > Replace Value : it would allow to modify the string of the selected value (pop up menu ? or maybe it would be better and faster if the selected value cell would turn into a text input field with the value already blue-highlighted/selected)
=> It would replace the previous value with the new value everywhere it was used : both in all instance properties + in all places in eventsheet where this string value was used for this variable
It would enhance the enum emulation aspect of this feature :)
Later this right click context menu could be useful for other things such as :
- Right Click > Select all instances with this string value
- Right Click > Find all references of this string value
Any chance to push as many little suggestions as possible from the dedicated suggestion platform before it get rebooted again in 2023 ?
Would be a great christmas gift to the community 🎅
Nice !
Regarding Conditions/Actions allowing us to reference something by its name (to allow us to create more dynamic systems), the 2 most annoying stuff that are missing in my daily use of the engine are :
1. [Tween Behavior] Set Tween Ease by String :
Replace the Ease dropdown list parameter of the Start Tween actions events by a string field, (With autocompletion with all built-in and custom Tweens), instead of the Dropdown List.
2. [System] Check if a Template Name exist for an Object Type Name :
Add a new condition to allow to check if a Template Name string exists for an Object Type Name string.
The Existing "Template Exists" condition requires us to select a specific Object, but it would be useful for a lot of systems to also be able to do that by Object Type Name.
Great update !
Thanks a lot for the project saving performance improvements, really welcomed bugfixes, Find feature enhancements and it's really nice to see easiers ways to manipulate Data thanks to new Array actions !
Good idea, i would add that I feel the default should be "search through all sheets" instead of "current sheet".
It makes more sense to have all the results at first and only then fine-tuned the results. 95% of the time, i want to search among all eventsheets
Great release !
Thanks again for the Event Search improvements !
Stellar update, thank you so much once again for those amazing QOL improvements !
Regarding Eases, would it be possible to replace the dropdown list parameter of the Start Tween action event [Tween Behavior] by a string ? (With autocompletion).
As you did back then to replace the dropdown list of Templates by a string field.
It would be handier as there are a lot of Default Eases but also it would be better and more flexible to set the Tween Type depending on the instance variable of an object for example.
Thank you so much for the Event Search !! It's really great
EDIT : Here is some thoughts regarding this :
1. Could you please move the Filter search Field right after the the Find Search Field ? This way we can just use TAB shortcut to switch between them, no need to click.
2. Could you add the CTRL + F shorcut to Layouts so it also open that Find Events window ? To keep things consistent and avoid us the need to first select an eventsheet each time. (It could default to "Look in : all Eventsheets in project")
3. Would it be possible to add a new shortcut to select the Project View Search Field ? It could be something like CTRL + SHIFT + F (and it should work both in Layout and Event Sheets)
(4. Less important - It would be great if the Ease expression was a system expression instead of a TimelineController expression. Eases can be very useful even if we don't use the Timeline Feature. It would also make the expression much shorter.)
Yeah i can't think of any use case either. Don't understand why this one was implemented immediatly after being suggested without gathering any vote while there is so much features a bunch of people ask and that would be really more useful.
For example a really simple one even if it looks like a dumb one : BBoxCenterX, BBoxCenterY, (+ViewportCenterX, ViewportCenterY, LayoutCenterX, LayoutCenterY ?) would be great QOL and are some of the top requested feature on the platform. We can't make our own utility function for those BBoxCenter that works with all objects, it would only work with specific families and pick by UID.
-"you can start with event sheets, add a few snippets of code in event sheets, and move on to using full coding"
-"as we would expect the most advanced users to shift from event sheets to coding"
I'm sorry but the promise of construct always has always been to be a nocode engine. That never was to stop using nocode feature ASAP
In fact after reading this i feel even less confident about it because you also don't recommand to mix JS and eventsheets, but to go full JS instead
Honestly this is a bit sickening. This looks like the whole argumentation about Events is against Construct itself and its original vision
We're expecting the actual No-Code features to not be considered as "just a toy". It's a bit weird the only way to prove C3 isn't a toy is skipping the NoCode part. The marketing and dev effort should instead go towards "yes NoCode is viable for serious stuff"
Also a bunch of us are experienced users and our path never was to move from ES to JS. I didn't learn JS using C3.
Disappointed you plan to go full JS and to work on a non built-in multiplayer project. That whole JS multiplayer part won't be useful for any of us.
I 100% agree with Everade. This game project could be the best opportunity ever for you to understand your users if you use mainly eventsheets and editor features instead. (Families/Event Search/Variables worfklow). You could quickly think to tiny improvements that would make stuff easier for your whole userbase, push updates that matters to the game you're making but that would also benefit for all of us.
Regarding the 2 main objectives : actually dogfooding and making a great demo of C3 capabilities, this kind of project doesn't seem to be the best choice. Probably half of the devtime will be related to make that (non builtin) multiplayer working well.
Is there any chance to make this project Singleplayer instead ? This way at least the JS/Events mix could be inspiring
Interested to see where it goes nonetheless, and good luck!
Member since 21 Oct, 2013