Construct 3 support

Discuss issues pertaining to the various game/web runtimes of Creature here.
neovive
Posts: 13
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:53 am

Construct 3 support

Post by neovive » Sun Nov 05, 2017 3:54 am

With the pending release of Construct 3 (www.construct.net), Scirra seems to be moving towards a fully web-based platform built on WebGL ( https://www.scirra.com/blog/198/constru ... chitecture). If feasible, are you planning to support a runtime for Construct 3? Here is the add-on SDK doc: https://www.construct.net/make-games/manuals/addon-sdk. Thanks.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by chong » Sun Nov 05, 2017 5:13 am

Hello,

Thanks for the links, will take a look at them when I get the cycles.
The issue with Construct 2 before was that their API was very limited and did not allow for many things, including accessing and displaying very important attributes/values associated with the Creature Asset. I am not sure if these restrictions are still in place in the new SDK, will have to take a look to find out.

Cheers

neovive
Posts: 13
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:53 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by neovive » Sun Nov 05, 2017 6:48 pm

Sounds great! I've been using Phaser for now, but am very interested in Construct3 for teaching a middle school game development club. My goal is to animate their hand-drawn art in Creature to use in their games.

Here are a few GitHub issues that you might find useful:
https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/510
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... issues/762

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by chong » Sun Nov 05, 2017 7:00 pm

Hello,

Yes indeed and thanks for the links. The issue is their documentation for the plugin SDK is very vague, specifically they do not cover any sort of rendering/drawing examples. I somehow suspect their API is still limiting plugin devs from rendering out anything in editor mode.
If somebody can gather information from them that we are interested in integrating the Creature runtimes into their system in a more complete/holistic way, that will be great. As of right now, the information I am getting from them is insufficient for a proper robust plugin implementation.

Thanks

psychoanima
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:25 pm

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by psychoanima » Thu Mar 29, 2018 11:42 pm

Hi Chong, have you check their sdk manual page?

https://www.construct.net/rs/make-games ... /addon-sdk

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by chong » Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:38 am

Hello,

I just took a look and could not find an efficient way to render triangulated meshes in their SDK yet.

Thanks

neovive
Posts: 13
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:53 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by neovive » Mon Oct 29, 2018 5:37 pm

Hi. I noticed that the new Contruct 3 runtime was recently released. Not sure if this changes anything regarding triangulated meshes, but here are some useful links:

https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/cons ... ntime-1037
https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/cons ... untime-911

Spriter Add-On - released 10-17-18
https://www.construct.net/en/make-games ... 92/spriter

Thanks.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by chong » Mon Oct 29, 2018 6:02 pm

Hello,

Thanks for the links. It looks like their rendering backend is still more or less the same:
https://www.construct.net/en/make-games ... glrenderer

They still do not allow for efficient rendering of meshes ( points, indices, uvs ). This is quite limiting. If you can figure out a way ( or if I missed anything here ) to render meshes efficiently in their API let me know.

Thanks

neovive
Posts: 13
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:53 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by neovive » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:41 pm

I'll take a look. I noticed that Ashley replied to your post in the drawing plugins discussion (https://www.construct.net/en/forum/cons ... 185/page-2), but it doesn't seem like dedicated mesh rendering functions are available yet in the newly released Construct 3 runtime.
We will probably add dedicated mesh rendering functions for the C3 runtime, but until then I'd rather avoid it as there's no equivalent for the canvas2d renderer with the C2 runtime. If you want to ignore canvas2d support, you can use the quad rendering approach as an interim solution.
Thanks again.

Update: I posted to the thread above and Ashley replied (https://www.construct.net/en/forum/cons ... 185/page-3). However, it doesn't seem to be what you need for efficient rendering.
It's been possible for a long time already with the existing API as I previously described:

"You can render meshes using quads. It simply means you draw two adjacent triangles at a time. If there are an odd number of triangles, you can issue a single triangle by issuing a quad with two points at the same position, i.e. a triangle and a degenerate triangle."

We don't have a dedicated mesh function yet, but it would only be a slight optimisation compared to that, so it doesn't seem essential.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Construct 3 support

Post by chong » Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:51 am

It's actually pretty essential to be honest, I am not sure if they are used with dealing with actual characters with complex meshes ( which is what Creature is designed for ). Creature meshes are typically quite large in order to display high quality deformation so having an efficient mesh renderer is crucial.

Cheers

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