Scirra has retired Construct Classic

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  • This is to officially announce that Scirra has retired the old and unmaintained Construct Classic in favour of the newer and actively maintained Construct 2.

    Hopefully this will not come as a surprise, because it has effectively been retired for the past year or so. This announcement is merely to put an official statement on the matter. We recommend Classic users move to Construct 2 and we strongly recommend new users to choose Construct 2.

    --

    Construct Classic was released in 2007 by volunteer students working in their spare time while in full-time education. It was made as a hobby, and we were surprised and glad to see how popular it became. However as a consequence of learning how to program while working on an enormous project, it had serious architectural limitations (such as having no good way to support other platforms than the Windows desktop), and was infamously buggy (even ardent supporters admit there are weird issues to avoid, and you have to learn which parts of the program work). In short it was obvious that Classic was not going to go anywhere in the long term.

    Subsequently in February 2011 we announced our intention to shift our focus to Construct 2, a complete ground-up rewrite with a focus on a portable HTML5 engine and a robust, stable editor. I would encourage you to re-read the thread to understand more about the decision. Shortly after that post we released the first public preview of Construct 2, and in the subsequent two years it's reached a point where it exceeds Classic on a great many fronts. There are still a couple of edge features that C2 doesn't cover, such as mesh distortion, but the list is dwindling and we do aim to cover these eventually with C2 as well. And on the other hand, C2 has many features that Classic lacks, such as portability to lots of platforms, a sensible Families system based off inheritance, Z Order editor, selection wrapping, continuous preview, persistent layouts, asynchronous pathfinding, and more.

    Construct 2 is commercial software. Please understand that Classic was developed by volunteer students who could afford to live off student loans while in full-time education. That's no longer the case, and we have to make a living like everyone else does - but in return we can now afford to work full-time on development, rather than Classic's patchy schedule of whenever we were free.

    We had a couple of community-maintained releases of Classic, but eventually all the developers moved on. For about a year now there has been no development activity on Classic at all. We had started to describe it as "effectively retired", but to our surprise some new users have still been coming to our site and choosing to use Classic instead of Construct 2, then making support requests when they had problems or questions. It really makes no sense for new users to choose Classic when it's unmaintained, and being a tiny company (there are 3 of us) the idea of supporting or maintaining Classic is out of the question. This has prompted us to officially retire Classic.

    The source code of Classic is still available on SourceForge, and in the spirit of the open source project we will leave it there. However I wouldn't recommend anyone attempt any further work on it. The code is of such poor quality we decided to throw out the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that make up Classic and start all over again. If you have any interest in working on an editor, I would strongly recommend you start from scratch.

    We recommend all Construct Classic users make plans to migrate to Construct 2 if they are not already in the process of doing so. We also strongly recommend new users choose Construct 2 instead of Classic.

    The Construct Classic forums have all been collapsed to sub-forums of the Construct Classic Discussion forum, to de-emphasise them from the main forum list. We are keeping the forums open because they require almost no maintenance, and we don't want to unnecessarily upset anyone who still uses Classic. However I anticipate that these forums will eventually fall silent, and then we may see fit to remove them completely. If this worries you, perhaps consider setting up a separate discussion forum of your own. Over the next few days we will be de-emphasising Classic from the rest of our official pages on the Scirra.com website, and removing the Construct Classic download links. (It will still be available directly from SourceForge, as ever, where we intend to leave it indefinitely.)

    Thank you for your interest in Construct Classic; we always enjoyed the active community here during the Classic days, and it's part of what spurred us on to make Construct 2, which we now make a living from. The community has done a lot for us, and we hope we've done a lot for you too with our work on Classic and C2 as well. However the time has come to move on. Remember that "in a rapidly advancing world, to stand still is to move backwards."

  • Thanks for all the work you guys have done on CC and C2 so far <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> I still remember the first time I found CC on the CD of a PC magazine years ago in the UK <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Awwwww, I always loved CC, but I knew, that day will come. Construct classic was my first and only 2D game engine I've spent my time that much.

    So I like C2 all the more, because I can keep using what I've learned in CC. And hopefully, the community will again support C2 with the same amount of plugins, behaviors and effects, like in CC :).

    Zyb

  • Sad, but inevitable, Construct Classic has certainly helped in putting Scirra on the "gamemaking" map, Still a great program,but in the last 6 months C2 has really upped it's game in many areas, and using classic now, it is beginning to feel like the podgy dinosaur of the two...

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  • It's time to move on then...

  • The king is dead, long live the king!

  • Finally this day has come... It's a pity. But life goes on. So C2 I'm coming for you!

  • I have no money to buy the C2 license, so FOR NOW i'm not going to migrate :P

  • Found it so late. Well I'm not done yet! About a year is't enough.

  • Not everyone has money for Construct 2, so I will still use CC because it's free and more user-friendly. :)

  • No, sir. I flatly reject this announcement.

    Construct Classic, FOREVER.

  • Construct Classic is legend and legends NEVER die!

  • Although Construct Classic is still as good and as useful as it ever was, Construct 2 has much more potential and is getting way better every month. Scirra's managed to iron out a tonne of bugs that Construct Classic has both in editing and runtime.

    It's not good to consider Construct 2 as competing with Construct Classic and vice versa. I often recommend Construct Classic to people still as it's free to get into and learn all the features with, then I advise that once they have a prototype in CC they should port over to the full-version of C2 as it's even better. Construct 2 is well worth the money, especially when you plan on selling your games as they will work on many platforms and content stores almost out of the box. Not to mention, you won't have the headaches of wondering why your game doesn't work on certain computers, or trying to get the users to update DirectX 9 files.

    It's fair for Scirra to want to retire CC. This means they don't need to deal with people e-mailing them asking why the program crashes on Vista 3.0 or how to mess with the source code.

    I agree with Scirra that CC should always be available on the Sourceforge, but I'm starting to feel the small mention on the "About Scirra" page is enough now, maybe in a few years getting its own page again in a "Retired Products" section, when HTML5 and WebGL is on every device.

    Keeping a small forum section like this for those who still use retired products would be really nice though.

  • Hi, My name is Brian Chen and I'm an Advanced C/C++ Programmer.

    I would like to take over the development of Construct Classic.

    I have used Construct Classic in the past and I like it.

    Also I would like to join the development team of Construct 2.

    please contact me at visualpaascalteamfqt@gmail.com if I can help...

    Thank you,

    All of the best,

    Brian Chen

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