Construct 2 Release r140

New this build: introducing the debugger! There's also a new option to export directly to the Amazon Appstore using their new support for web-based apps.

The Debugger

The new debugger allows inspection of the entire state of the game in real-time, including performance details. There are controls to pause, resume, save state, load state, restart and more. You can browse a list of every instance in the game, and view the values of various expressions and properties of the selected object. This should be a vastly superior option to the old technique of using lots of on-screen text objects! It can also be snapped out in to its own window for multi-monitor debugging. It should even work on mobiles and tablets via preview-over-Wifi (although the text can end up pretty small/fiddly), and is designed to have zero code overhead when exporting - all the debugger related code is stripped from the project on export, so there's no performance, file size or security implications.

The debugger can be run from the ribbon, the quick-launch bar, right-clicking layouts or projects in the Project Bar, or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F5.

We have lots more to add. Currently the debugger is read-only - you can't change any values. It also can only pause in between frames. We plan to add support for editing values, breaking on individual events, improving the experience on mobile devices, adding more detailed performance information possibly down to the level of CPU usage of individual event groups, and possibly also performance graphs. These should gradually be introduced over the next few releases, and hopefully we can launch the full-featured debugger in the next stable update. We'll cover the debugger capabilities in more detail in future documentation/blog posts, but for now have a play with it and see how it works for you!

Export to Amazon Appstore

We're also adding a new option to export directly to the Amazon Appstore (the store used by Amazon devices such as the Kindle Fire HD). The Amazon Appstore now supports publishing HTML5 apps just like native apps, but powered by the Chromium browser engine. This means you get all the power of the Chrome browser for native apps, including hardware acceleration. It doesn't support WebGL or the Web Audio API just yet, but they should be coming in future, and the performance is still pretty good with hardware-accelerated canvas2d. We aim to extend support with IAP and other platform-specific features in later releases as well, and improve the tutorial on publishing, but in the mean time you have the basic support to try out.

To get started with the Amazon Appstore, see the (currently draft) tutorial on How to export to the Amazon Appstore.