I've been searching for a game engine that I could get up and running with quickly. I thought I'd found it in Construct 3.

However, the pricing model for this product is asinine.

I've had a number of true hobbies over the years, and C3 development has been BY FAR the cheapest. I use it for several hours per day, so my hourly cost of using it (and really enjoying this hobby) is a handful of pennies per hour. Name one other hobby you can enjoy for pennies per hour! Only reading comes to mind...

If $130/yr USD is too much for you, you're be better off looking elsewhere to save money. You probably pay 2X that for milk.

I think pandabear7413 means the first preview after loading the project. I also have to work with large projects with lots of images, and the first time I click preview, it takes 1-2 minutes to re-generate spritesheets. If I have to load a different project version - that's another 2 minutes of waiting to preview it. Accidentally closed the editor - another 2 minutes. These minutes add up to many hours over the course of development..

This. It's just on my first preview after loading the project. As Ashley said, subsequent previews are very fast unless I change the animations. dop2000, would the feature I'm suggesting help you as well? Not sure if you large sprites like me, or 1000's of small sprites...

If Chrome is dying when you preview the game then that's a sign you may have gone too far, 7gb of images really ?

I currently have 1.2 GB of images in my images folder. How much memory is actually consumed by Chrome varies -- it usually spikes up to 3-5gb total on the first preview, but that number comes down as Chrome stays open longer. Sometimes Chrome will crash due to running out of memory, sometimes not. Seems like crashes happen more regularly when a new Chrome version is released.

I have large animations because I use these sprite objects as videos of sorts during the game, and I have about 50 or so such sprites ranging from 100 to 400 mb each. Suffice it to say, this approach of using sprites has worked well in my game and I'm not looking to change it.

My idea of ignoring specific sprites during preview mode seems like an efficient solution here. Ashley, can you comment on if that's a realistic (and not too difficult) feature that can be added? Happy to submit a request if so.

Thanks

At the beginning destroy all the sprites with which you have the animations

It sounds like you are using an exceptionally large amount of images. See the manual guide on memory usage - if you're doing something very inefficient you can quite often easily reduce the memory usage by 50-75%.

Thanks, but the issue isn't with animations on a specific layout. I'm familiar with the guide you're referring to, ASHLEY. I'm also familiar with the approach of destroying the animations after they've been created on a layout, and even freeing up the memory afterwards if necessary. I use those techniques quite a bit in my game. But my question is about something different...

When using preview mode, all sprite animations in the game are converted to spritesheets, regardless of whether the actual sprites are used in layouts in the game. There doesn't seem to be a way to exclude any sprites from this spritesheet process. And since I have so many sprite animations, this spritesheet process takes a lot of time and consumes a lot (3-5 gb) of memory during preview mode.

My question is -- is it realistic to add a feature that can exclude sprites from the spritesheet process FOR PREVIEW MODE ONLY. As I mentioned in the OP, I usually don't need most of thesprites/animations during preview. I can imagine a feature where the developer can select sprites or even specific sprite animations in the editor, and specify if they should be ignored during preview mode so spritesheets for those animations aren't created in memory.

Hope this makes sense but happy to clarify more if need be.

Thanks

Bumping...

Ashley, any thoughts on if this is a reasonable feature request, or if there's a way to accomplish this with existing features?

Thanks

I have a lot of sprites with heavy animations in my game. These all work well when exporting, but they make it harder to preview the game -- "preparing images" can take several minutes, and sometimes Chrome (what I use for the C3 editor) runs out of memory. The game, along with the C3 editor, takes 5-7 GB of memory during preview.

However, I usually don't need most of these sprites/animations during preview, so it would be great to be able to disable/ignore certain sprites during preview mode. I can imagine a feature where the developer can select sprites or even specific sprite animations in the editor, and specify if they should be ignored during preview mode so spritesheets for those animations aren't created in memory. Does this sound like a realistic new feature, and/or is there a way to accomplish through existing features? Happy to submit a new feature request if this is feasible.

Thanks

Thanks Ashley for this excellent and thorough overview. Makes me more confident in using the service.

Now that minifying is done with a remote service with r358+ (I'm assuming the service is hosted by Scirra), how is security of our information/code being handled during minifying? What data is being transmitted? Is the data encrypted at rest and in transit? Is this called out anywhere in the Scirra terms of service?

Thanks

I just spent a lot of time debugging an issue, and it turns out I had one letter off in the function name string when calling a function from a function map (I used "playball" instead of "playBall").

Is there a way to check if a function exists in a function map?

It's also possible to put "On file operation complete" event inside of a loop, but this feels like a hack.

dop2000 - Sorry to hijack this thread but not sure how else to connect to you directly. I posted this a little while back and I seem to remember you doing something similar in the past. Is this something you're familiar with?

Thanks!

Adding dop2000 since I seem to remember you mentioning this in one of your posts...

I have an animation-heavy game (lots of sprites and frames). These animation slow down the game build process, and I only need a few during actual development, so I want to commit them to github, save them as .zip files using the animation editor, and then delete the local copies. Then, when I'm ready to release a new version, I want to re-add them to my game by loading the animation from the zip files.

At this point, my expectation is that github will recognize them as the same files and will not add them again. However, when I tested this with github, it re-added every frame of the deleted animations. So my git repository is getting bloated (I believe) -- right?

What's the best way to do this? I admit I don't really understand github too well...

Thanks

Dang those are some good suggestions. Thanks again dop2000!

Has anyone come up with a simple and effective approach to add/edit dictionary keys during debugging? I created a UI of sorts to edit a dictionary at runtime, but it's specific to one dictionary and pretty clunky. Wondering if there's an easy way to have a console view or similar to view and edit dictionary values at runtime.

Thanks