Please keep all posts pertaining to the development of construct and related endeavors by Tigerworks and crew in this thread, minus the flamewars and spam.
Anywho, in recent news as shown at http://www.scirra.com since the 25th of october, Scirra has moved to make Construct into an open-sourced project, a game development project licensed under the GNU GPL, much like Firefox or Emacs. Aside from various legal troubles that will resolve themselves in due time, this allows for greater programmer interaction with the upcoming environment. Whether you view it as an alternative to or competition with the programming language of your choice, the new open-source format assures that it will offer the best possible programming application, provided we get involved.
For those new to the issue;
Construct is powerful and easy to use development software for both DirectX 9-based games and applications. It includes an event based system for defining how the game or application will behave, in a visual, human-readable way; it allows for programming code to be aligned into an easy to interact array, as opposed to normal linear coding such as C++.
Features:
Create games and applications with:
* Super fast hardware-accelerated DirectX 9 graphics engine
* Add multiple pixel shaders for advanced special effects, including lighting, HDR, distortion, lenses and more
* Physics engine for realistic object behaviour
* Place object on different layers for organising display, parallaxing, or whole-layer effects
* Debugger giving you complete control over all aspects of your game for testing purposes.
* Smaller, faster specialised runtime for applications
* 50+ plugins ranging from Tiled Background to database access
In its new open-sourced format, you not only get a stable programming environment, but you can modify it to your whims;
Construct is developed open source under the General Public License (GPL). This means you can download and use Construct for free, but it also means that the underlying source code - the code that defines how the program works - is also freely available. This means other programmers are free to fix errors in the code, make their own changes to how Construct works, or even write and distribute their own edition of Construct.
For more information, see Open-source Software (Wikipedia) and GPL (Wikipedia), the open-source license Construct uses.
I personally feel that this is offer a much more mainstream acceptance of the beleaguered visual-programming environment as popularized by such programs as VisualBasic and Clickteam's TGF/MMF, but without artificial caps on what you can create, and with the all-important hardware acceleration which lets us develop on a more cutting-edge, competitive field. This could be a boon even to professionally developed games and applications, and an excellent tool when its ready. However, like all opensourced projects, it relies on getting user interaction snowballing instead of dying out, and this is an great opportunity for us as a community to get the word out and get the ball rolling.
People of all programming backgrounds are welcomed on TDC. Whether your only experience is with Gamemaker, Darkbasic, Visual Basic, C++, Java, Clickteam products, Construct, or any other language, this is a community for all game and application developers. When there is news pertaining to new developments in the development world, we should know straightaway. No question about programming is off-topic here.
Obviously not enough threads about it if this is the only unlocked one. If you intend to discuss nothing but Clickteam products, the Clickteam keeps a very capable forum itself.
So who else has tried out the construct demo, or any of the older builds? I found that alot of the graphical features were extremely impressive, and the DirectX9 will be fun to work with. However, I'm a little uneasy about the basic code structure and the overall ease of use it will represent, along side the secondary features such as drawing tools. I hope that the newer versions of this will improve.
now now. we dont need to start resorting to name calling. we are not 5 years old anymore. I find that both copnstruct and MMF offer things that the other doesn't. for instance in construct you have HWA available now wheras MMF doesn't. however in MMF you have a wide array of available extensions and a good bacbone of support whereas construct doesn't really have that many plugins available as of yet. i have both products on my PC and whilst i have not really "played" with construct i believe that each will come into its own.
Fixed up te the topic a bit, folks please keep it on topic
"Please keep all posts pertaining to the development of construct and related endeavors by Tigerworks and crew in this thread, minus the flamewars and spam. "
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oh and I also think this will be better than MMF2 as people will fix and add things that MMF2 doesn't have. shall we be sad? I'm not learning another game creator
You'll probably find clickteam do work on things all the time (like other products?). But who has the most work to do?
Clickteam have an actual business to run whereas the Construct guys can concentrate solely on making their program.
Thats probably why initially the construct team are fixing problems a lot faster.
Still click team have been around much longer so i suppose things like hardware acceleration are a little late in coming.
Construct, in theory, sounds amazing, but it has a lot of bugs to iron out before it becomes usable. When the beta first came out I toyed around with it, and I thought it was going to be amazing, but simple things that I became used in to in MMF2 didnt even work in Construct, so thats where the program essentially broke down.
What I really want is MMF2 to get all the features that construct is boasting. Management of event sheets (a global event sheet for the game engine would be a dream come true), direct x 9, fancy physics (that dont run at 20 fps), and so on... that probably isnt going to happen though, and since I'm pretty experienced with MMF2 I dont know if I'm ready to go through the learning curve of using construct when it finally has a stable and usable version.
I had a go on construct today, the general way it works seems to be waaaay better than MMF2 (Sadly). Theres also so many little things that are very cool about it. Like zoom factors on layers, effects on layers, Allowing scrolling out of the play area, angles in decimals, positions in decimals etc.
Some of little things make your game look much more classy than MMFs alternatives.
I haven't had it crash yet or reached its limits, so I have no idea how good it really is, but right now it looks *amazing*.
I had the same issue as xerus, the way events work it very different. I couldn't get a simple object to be affected by gravity with:
while 1=1 ->
add 1 to "value"
move "object" "value" pixels down
(not worded exactly but anyway) and nothing doing, no movement or anything (seriously is there an always event?)
It seems like a good idea, but I like many others don't want to learn another visual programming app, the next thing I want to learn to program is actual code. It'll be popular with the new people in the scene though, that's for sure.
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