Construct 2 Release r94

New User Media plugin (beta). Allows webcam access and taking pictures. New 'Webcam.capx' example in examples folder demonstrates. Only works in Chrome 21+, which you can get now as Google Chrome Canary (a testing version of Chrome that installs side-by-side with your stable Chrome if you have it already). Since this is standard it should also eventually be coming to other browsers too.

System: support for snapshotting the canvas (taking a screenshot of the current display). 'Snapshot canvas' action then triggers 'On canvas snapshot' after it is taken, and then the system expression 'CanvasSnapshot' returns a data URI of an image for the canvas. This can be loaded in to Sprite or Tiled Background with their 'Load image from URL' actions, or opened as a URL in the Browser object to open the image in a new tab (so you can save the image to disk). Possibly also useful for screenshotting player progress for save points - you could store the result in WebStorage, but note most browsers limit that to 5mb so you might want to set the format to low-quality JPEG to minimise the size as much as possible.

Platform: 'Fall through' action. Will fall through a jump-thru platform if standing on one.

Pin behavior: new 'PinnedUID' expression (get UID of object pinned to), and a new Mode parameter for the 'Pin' action. You can now choose between 'position & angle', 'position only', 'angle only', 'rope style' and 'bar style'. Rope style is different in that it updates the position to follow the object at a fixed distance, as if attached by an invisible rope. 'Bar' keeps the object at a fixed distance, as if attached by an invisible rigid bar. Two new examples in the Examples folder demonstrates these. Of particular interest is the new 'Pin chain style.capx' example, which uses a family and for-each loop to pin together a chain of instances (a useful technique advanced users may find interesting).

Browser object: while 'Is downloading update' is true, the system expression 'loadingprogress' is now also set to the download progress of the update. This allows you to also display the progress of background updates, or re-use your loader layout as an update layout as well.

System expression: unlerp(a, b, y). Calculates (y - a) / (b - a). If lerp(a, b, x) = y, then unlerp(a, b, y) = x. E.g. unlerp(10, 20, 14) = 0.4. Tip: may be useful to use with clamp, e.g. clamp(unlerp(a, b, y), 0, 1) to ensure result does not go outside [0, 1] range.

WebStorage: JSON support. Can get all local storage in JSON format and set all local storage from a JSON string. Allows for backing up or transferring WebStorage data. The JSON format is the same as the Dictionary object, so Dictionary and WebStorage JSON data can be interchanged; however note that WebStorage stores everything as strings, so transferring Dictionary to WebStorage and back to Dictionary will have the effect of converting all numbers to strings.

Bullet behavior: 'DistanceTravelled' expression, 'Compare distance travelled' condition

Physics: 'Bullet' property. Enable enhanced collision detection for fast moving objects, but note this may also reduce performance, so try to avoid using it unnecessarily.

Physics: new actions 'Set prevent rotation', 'Remove all joints' (funny to build contraptions out of joints then watch them disintegrate when you remove joints!)

Audio: preload by name

Ribbon: a new 'Start page' button, to bring back or focus to the start page.

Construct 2 now checks if it has write access to the save location before saving. It will show a better error message (rather than a check failure or bug report message) if it does not have permission to use the given folder.

Breaking change: the Bullet behavior no longer changes angle of motion when setting the object angle if 'Set angle' is 'No'. Existing projects may need to add a 'Set angle of motion' after a 'Set angle' action. However, it still sets the angle of motion to the object angle when the object is first created, otherwise projects like Space Blaster (which spawn bullets and immediately set their angle) get broken. The 'Set angle' option now also defaults to 'Yes'.

Dictionary object: altered icon to try to better convey it is a data storage object (and not for example an English dictionary)

Exporting Windows 8 Metro apps now supports Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 2012 Express. Previously it only supported the Consumer Preview.

Sprite, Tiled Background: could not load images from data URIs

Using global objects on loader layouts (including Array and input plugins like Keyboard) did not work properly

Saving a folder project to a .capx could break the folder project if certain changes had been made and not saved

Sprite's 'Is between angles' did not work properly if the angle range was over 180 degrees

Sprite: negated 'Is overlapping' changed how it picked instances in r93 - should now work like it did in r92

Display glitches could occur if the bottom layer was invisible