Construct 2 and 1080p Capabilities?

Ouya and stand alone PC game project in mind. Interested in filming live action HD sequences for story cut scenes similar to the Wing Commander series of games. Also looking at creating scale model levels and background layers for an all-hd digitized look.

I've been reading reports that construct 2 may be too weak for 1080p, and android support is no-native with unpredictable results.

I may need to look at alternatives, which is sad because I was really beginning to develop an understanding of construct. We are a team of award nominated filmmakers and effects artists, hoping to turn heads with a proof of concept game and eventual commercial release.

Did you test with CocoonJS?

What does "construct 2 may be too weak for 1080p" ?

If i made 1080p game with 5 256x256 sprites it mean that it will be not playable?

Unless you're building a game for gaming computers, 1080p with hundreds of huge sprites will be too much probably.

Almost all modern platforms hardware-accelerate rendering. Construct 2 does not have any particular weakness here; if the hardware can handle 1080p rendering, then I'm sure Construct 2 games will work OK as well.

I haven't tested anything yet. The game would have a project area of 1920x1080. Actor size may be something like 64x128 (tall) or some such. Individual layer elements will range but will have to appear whole in screen dimensions. Enemies and props of different sizes of course, you don't need me to explain how that all works.

Still no answer on video playback capabilities of construct?

Don't know what Cocoonjs is. As I said, I'm learning in the free demo version, I'd hate to buy the license to discover Construct 2 doesn't do what I require of it. There seems to be exactly zero examples of games made with Construct running at 1080p WITH high definition assets. The most complete games I've ran on the nexus 7 tablet either crash at startup or run in single-digit framerates... That can't be the standard...

Alright I'll take at shot at answering your question.

C2 does 1080p. This is not the limit of the engine. This is just pixel(w/h) value. C2 will do just fine, but it's not your entire answer regarding what you want. If you were running on the PC you would be just fine. your not. Your targeting mobile platforms I suspect Ouya and iPad with retina?

"Almost all modern platforms hardware-accelerate rendering. Construct 2 does not have any particular weakness here; if the hardware can handle 1080p rendering, then I'm sure Construct 2 games will work OK as well."

This is true to a large extent, but not everything. C2 piggy backs on UIWebview(built in browser widget for ios and android). This for mobile has hit major rendering road block. WebGL is the javascript bindings to the OpenGL graphics acceleration. Which IOS and Android do not have. It only has canvas acceleration and it's not the same thing nor does it carry the same rendering speeds. In fact Canvas acceleration is much slower than any of the GL rendering.

The Tegra 3(Ouya) can in 720p in OpenGL ES can render 5000 moving sprites and get smooth performance. In the Android NDK(Java) youtube.com/watch A simlar test on PC in C2 with WebGl and I only managed 3000 in 720p before the 60fps would slow down. The same test on the iPad2 resulted in a steady 80fps before slow down. The tegra 2 resulted in 15fps(browser and CocoonJS) for only 10 sprites. Now these aren't the Tegra 3 which will do better. ok cocoonjs

CocoonJS is a canvas accelerator. It attempts to improve logic performance to native speeds. It improves Canvas rendering by a lot too. It does improve performance for for IOS and Android. Doubles the base FPS, but will quickly drop down based on a sprite curve. ie the more sprites the more the performance curve drops. The catch here is that CocoonJS/team Ludie doesn't have an Ouya and CocoonJs apps crash. So there is no option to develop for Ouya with CocoonJS. Your limited to using Phonegap and performance is nowhere near as good.

For now. Skip the 1080/960. Go for 960x640 and keep the sprites down for now. Until coocoonjs is workign anyways.

good luck. C2 is awesome :) buy it

Hi Lovelocke64

If you need more info about what CocoonJS is:

vimeo.com/45506217

Or visit our site at ludei.com

oh yes, C2 can play video. I've seen a few video's playing with C2. I'm sure there will be no problem playing video's in C2. heck if you wanted a video in the background while playing a game in the foreground should be doable :) And running on newer mobile hardware should be fine. Anything from late 2012 power wise should. But I can't stress enough how awesome C2 is and worth purchasing and if your going mobile. Team Ludie CocoonJS is a must.

scirra.com/forum/cocoonjs-screencanvas_topic61552.html

This is a good thread to hear about performance capabilities :)

Thank you everyone, I appreciate the detailed feedback. I am in love with the concept of Construct 2, and as I mentioned, it has begun to make sense to me... but I'm not doing all of this to make a game for the web, is what it boils down to. I have some wild ambition, and I just wanted to make sure the path to take my HD game to the Ouya, to the Tegra 4 powered Nvidia "Project Shield" and to stand-alone PC was "all green" before buying into the technology.

I have invested in other programs similar to this in the past, even thought about paying the premium subscription for Gamesalad, but in one way or another there has been one bottleneck (or seven) that stood in the way of doing what -I- want to do with it. Construct 2 deserves to have some showcase titles developed for it, and with the group of artists I have attracted to the concept of the project, I'd like to imagine myself bringing that "high end" look to what is being seen as a "for beginners" program.

Polish, polish, polish... it may turn out that we try to develop the game at a 720P resolution and simply "upconvert" the game to a 1080p resolution for Ouya, for PC... if Construct in fact can't handle moving around the size/definition of the assets we're hoping to use.

Would such a thing be possible? It wouldn't have the clarity that something natively made in 1080p would have, but it may be a reasonable tradeoff if it's the best Construct 2 can do. I've searched Google, Youtube and various forums looking for an example of a game running at 1080p, and have turned up -nothing-. Many games are developed for mobile platforms and resolutions at or below standard definition... and regrettibly, many of those games run with framerates in the single digits on a modern Celeron-powered PC (I'm using my mother's computer as a low-end test machine). At home, I have a video card that by today's standards would be considered medium-low end... it can run Skyrim at around those details and pull 35-45 fps outdoors, hugs 50-60fps indoors with that game. Apples and oranges comparison, but I'm just saying... we're also NOT making Skyrim, although we are talking some high-end 2D work.

The first step will be the proof of concept. This will be a game that has the video introduction, a handful of video death sequences, and a video conclusion. We will use basic digitized actor animation for our lead character and likely end up creating "puppets" for a small selection of enemies in addition to "real" high quality photographed sets and scanned, handpainted landscapes for the background.

Total gameplay time might equal 10 minutes with say, 4 minutes of video around that. If it all holds together, and impresses people both here in the forum and out in the world, then we'll go the kickstarter route to supplement our bigger scale project.

AS already said, a high resolution is perfectly manageable by high end desktop computers.

And the reason you found "poor" looking games on mobiles is just that mobile hardware is pretty weak in regards to desktop computers.

Nevertheless have a look at spriter, such a tool should help with your project.

Carefully designed, a triple AAA game is doable in C2, and you're right, C2 is waiting for a killer app.

But the game you're envisioning won't be an easy task. Whatever the framework/engine you do the game in, each platforms you target have their own specificities and limitations and are very different from one another.

You won't be able to have a high end game execute the same on a high end computer and on a smartphone that was released even before the first implementations of HTML5.

For a starter you should just focus on desktop development. This you can be sure, is handled by C2 and will give you the necessary experience and something to show for.

Also important feedback. PC is actually the "Target" for this, as generally PC gamers have very capable hardware under the hood (though wildly varied). Being able to take it multi-platform would be preferred just because 1) Exposure 2) Expanded demographic.

I'm reading that you can play games offline, but does that mean Construct 2 will export .exe's and so on for a "PC Game", not just something you load in a browser? The expectation there would be to create an installer, upload it to a site, put a price tag on it, have someone pay + download, install, and then click an icon on the desktop.

Off-topic, but important nonetheless. I will continue reading up on it, but there's nothing saying "Create stand-alone PC titles"... Apart from "Create Windows 8 app"... I don't have Windows 8 and it certainly doesn't seem to be a popular OS for games.

Being able to sell the game via Steam, GOG.com would be nice bonuses... but I know of several "do it yourself" options that work along the same lines. They securely host the data you want to sell, and once its paid for, special links/codes are generated for that user to access and obtain the data.

'm reading that you can play games offline, but does that mean Construct 2 will export .exe's and so on for a "PC Game", not just something you load in a browser?

There's a third party wrapper thingy called Node-Webkit that comes bundled with the last couple of C2 betas. It's still html5 of course, but builds run as a regular exe would. No browser. Seems to work very well.

S already said, a high resolution is perfectly manageable by high end desktop computers.

Please define "high end". Also, you might be surprised how many people out there use computers that are not cutting edge. I'm guessing C2 users would like to target more than hardcore gamers.

Please define "high end". Also, you might be surprised how many people out there use computers that are not cutting edge. I'm guessing C2 users would like to target more than hardcore gamers.

Well, there's no shortage of "8-bit" games out there either in development or uploaded to the arcade, and each one of them appears to have issues with framerates on a Windows 7, 2GB Memory Celeron-D (I think it's called) system. By comparison, the same machine is good to go for casual games like Zuma, Diner Dash, and thing of that sort.

I'm speaking of my mother's computer... she likes those games, and on lesser specs, even those simple titles can get bogged down in the framerate department.

Me personally, I have a PC at home that's powered by a Quad Core Phenom Black Edition processor, 4GB of RAM, and an Nvidia graphics card considered high end four years ago. It's suitable for editing/rendering high definition video with Adobe Premiere, including post-processing coloring and effects on the timeline with Magic Bullet/Colorista plug-ins. If you weren't aware, video editing is some of THE hardest things for a computer to do, often times maxing out all four cores while encoding particularly.

Now, I don't have any framerate issues when playing the Scirra arcade games, but I use Firefox. I refuse Internet Explorer, I refuse Google Chrome (Google can't take over my WHOLE life, though I do use Gmail and Android mobile phone, as well as own a Tegra 3-powered Nexus 7 tablet). See, the thing is, "That's a lot of hardware for what's basically going to be Donkey Kong Country running in 1080p... and not everyone's going to have it."

The trick is to make a game that'd be as widely accessible as possible, while simultaneously fulfilling the "graphics whore" demands that modern gamers desire.

"Skullgirls" was nice because it was all hand-drawn sprites, backgrounds and the like. "Street Fighter II HD Remix" was nice because of the same reasons. Now go and download the "Mark of the Wolves" demo and see what a game made in "less than" 480p graphics looks like scaled up to your 1080p display. Blurry, that's for sure. The crispness of running a 1080p native game on a 1080p game is undisputedly better than mastering a game on a smaller resolution and upscaling... and that was the original point of me starting this thread.

Best I could tell, nobody has even set out to try and do a 1080p-native title in Construct. Sure it's "theoretically possible", but not by linking to any web-hosted 720x480 game and asking me to "Enable full screen mode". It's simply "Not the same", and if I'm looking at spending $120 for a license of Construct, $2900 for a license of software to EXPORT to a stand-alone .exe (as I was reading about in older forum threads... remember, this is would in fact be a game for profit), in addition to spending a budget of perhaps $10,000 to acquire/create unique game assets (which I would need SOME way of hiding as to prevent other people from outright stealing our sprites, background, music and the like), you begin to realize that "Theoretically" isn't as comforting as "Officially supported".

It's easy to ridicule this as "nit-picking, be happy with what's already in the engine", but if it's not enough then it's not enough... there's no hard feelings, but my mission is NOT to create the world's most expensive HTML 5 experiment... it's to make a game that makes some money. I would have artists to pay, developers to pay, and so on. If Construct 2's mission is to create an easy-to-create platform, then they've already done it... but for people with thousands of dollars ready to invest, they're going to put that money down on what works -best- for -THEIR- needs.

It may end up that I just use Construct 2 to create a standard definition 480P-native demonstration with all the proposed bells and whistles for the purpose of attracting developers and so on for a larger project, and that's ALSO okay. But that's rather limiting, it doesn't achieve the scale of what I'm looking to create, and therefore it may be in my best interest to look at a more capable (even if more complicated) development environment such as Unity 4. That's a bucket of cash alone for a pro license, but it's proven to thrive in an Android environment, proven to export native to Ouya, to PC, and yes, even to web. But the cost goes up dramatically, and it's something that I couldn't personally tackle without taking years and years of time.

The middle ground, I'm hoping, is Construct 2. Construct 2 needs native .exe exporting, native android exporting, native Ouya/whatever else support. I can appreciate that HTML 5 -should- be supported by everyone, but the more wrappers, money, and crap you have to tack onto the HTML 5 groundwork just to get it to work... then tweak it to get it all running as desired raises so many questions for so many support sites on the web, that at times, if you're "dreaming big" with Construct 2, you're "spending big" to get there... if "there" is even possible in reality. Remember, so much of this is "in theory".

Who wants to be the guy holding the bag on that pricetag with a game that runs well in one browser on one website for 18% of PCs in the world?

There are over 2 million pixels on a 1920x1080 screen, which in 32-bit color mode 60 FPS is a bandwidth of about 500 MB/s - not including things like intermediate rendering for effects. You need hardware which can reach those sorts of numbers to do that. It's not specific to Construct 2 or HTML5! If you use Unity, your users will still need graphics hardware that can push those sorts of numbers. And note rendering happens entirely on the GPU, so having lots of CPU cores and loads of system RAM doesn't help, only the graphics chip does. Graphics chips also typically have special pipelines for rendering video, since it's simpler than rendering games (where you have factors like over-draw, shaders and multitexturing).

BTW in our latest betas we've dropped Awesomium in favour of node-webkit for desktop exporting. Not only is it faster and working better overall, there's also no fee for commercial use.