Click Team Fusion 2.5 - issues

I've never ran into an issue like that, when I started using fusion I miss understood a lot of things in the event editor,
sometimes I would enter an event where the order of the events would make it not work.

At first I thought there were some glitches in the game engine, then I found out it was a user glitch (me) hahahah.

Example
I submitted a bug report because I thought animations freeze up when your character is
standing on the ground and then the user presses a key to play an animation.

Later I found an example about how animation works in fusion with minimum and max speed.

There are legit bugs you can report. About the issues you are having, would you be able to post an example to check it out?

about this

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Here is one of the threads I have found in the internet:
There's a limit to the number of certain types of objects that can be in a frame (room/level) at once. It's not a hard limit, but exceed it, and your program will exhibit erratic behavior and could even crash, including but not limited to: objects disappearing, events not triggering, blit errors, and full-on memory leaks. This is made worse when you want to have large levels and realize that you can't really utilize traditional tilemaps without resorting to workarounds. This is actually the rub that finally made me switch from Fusion to a competitor.

LOL this is just sounds like someone who constantly likes to complaint about fusion. XD
pay no attention to such comments, fusion is a really capable game engine and possibly the best 2D game engine out there.
There are plenty of commercial games made in clickteam fusion and they work perfect.

I am working on a complex game for the last 8-9 months now, with tons of files and objects..
There is a limit of 20.000 objects on a screen PER Frame.. , but you will never reach to that.. my max currently is 1200 objects..

I am Using fusion everyday for almost 2 years now, and never run into issues with final builds.
And I made a bunch of games already.
Don't let yourself scare away from 1 or 2 statements... Like Sparckman says... those are usually the same people that have nothing better to do, than complaining about every little detail

Check out some of the games here
Please login to see this link.

No software is 100% perfect but if you figure out how to use it you can get some very nice results.
We have a number of people who make their whole living off games and apps created with Fusion.

Occasionally people want to blame the tool for their failure rather then learn how to use the tool better within its boundaries.

Amen to that one Jeff.
There are tons of guides, videos on you tube. Even Sparkman has a bunch. I gained a lot of knowledge through that and from help from other people here on the forum or the chat.

Check out this video i just posted, fusion is solid.
[video=youtube_share;wRkiPt1NyxY]Please login to see this media element.]

Please login to see this picture. Please login to see this link.

Please login to see this picture. Please login to see this link.

It's no problem to handle many small objects but if you want to go with loads of different and large graphics and maybe in FullHD you can get serious problems.

Have a look here: Please login to see this link.

Especially if you're new to Fusion 2.5 you really have to do smaller projects first - yeah, like everywhere else too. But you need to know the limits.
I'm also planing a huge game but luckily I don't have time at the moment. Luckily because I think it's hard to realize in F2.5 with the outdated Array object etc.
Fusion 3 should be the way to go ... or another engine. It all lays in the hands of Clickteam.

Array object works fine.. using 900+ array files in my project with all kinds of dimensions and no problems.

It seems you never used Arrays excessively, Perry.

Of course they work "fine". As long as you are fine without having standard functions like the simplest push, pop or even sort.
In some developing environments you have about 50 functions to work with Arrays quickly. - In Fusion you can ... save ... and load.

So imagine you have a large database for your RPG. You have to sort rows, you have to switch positions, values, rows or just insert a new item between others etc.
All this you can work around with creating your own "functions" with fast loops. In higher states of developement this will get incredible complex and unhandy.
Sooner or later your "engine" will stutter because of the hundrets of loops working in the background ... reading and writing to Arrays permanently ... trying to work around the boundaries.

In smaller projects you won't experience this of course if you know about "good coding" in Fusion.
But in larger projects you will get serious problems... sooner or later.

Gustav you often post quite negatively about limits in Fusion. Whilst I do admit that arrays are under featured in Fusion, most of the other things you mention are not problems that everyone experiences. We have some examples of very complex Fusion made games which work just great and without these sorts of issues.

As I would say to any user, Fusion does a lot of the easy stuff for you and makes the process of development and prototyping much more rapid. At the end of the day though to make more complex projects, as with any language or development environment, you have to adapt your techniques and style, but most of all plan plan plan. We have so many examples of top-class projects from our user base that it's hard to keep making these arguments any more.

I just wanted to tell new users to know the limits and not just start and run into a dead end and give up frustrated.

Of course you can do a lot if you have some experience. A very good example should be Heart Forth, Alicia.
But just yesterday I read that Dungeon Dashers will move from Fusion to Unity because of the limits.

But as said - these are really huge games.

Games that wouldn't even exist had they not been first developed or proto-typed in Fusion.

I am sure Dungeon Dashers could have used Mathias conversion service to C++ and even get better performance then it will get in Unity.

I remember walking thru the unity booth at the GDC and hearing .... Darn Unity crashed again let me reboot this a number of times.... Its not perfect or easy to use.

This game is a couple years older but it still blows me away.
[video]Please login to see this media element.]

Wow, looks cool

Fusion's great, it Please login to see this link. that can be easily avoided, and the engine (like any of them) is far from perfect. Fusion 3 definitely sounds like a confident step to address many issues, big and small.

Jeff: REALLY BIG SKY you linked to looks awesome. Sadly, Fusion's runtime doesn't natively support my platform [Please login to see this link., Please login to see this link.], and Please login to see this link. (possibly related to Gustav's point)

Simon: I agree mostly with your second paragraph, but there are times where the Clicker is "locked out" of choices because of situations out of our control -- whether it's engine/IDE bugs, closed source (only Clickteam and extension developers can improve their existing features/extensions, everyone else has to write a new one, request or forget it, Please login to see this link.), and legacy code that is holding back innovation (like vectors, true full-screen in HD) -- although, that might change from what's heard of Fusion 3!

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The best advice is to not give up, and keep trying -- you'll get there eventually.

I have heard plenty of people complaining about limits or shortcomings in other development tools and indeed in programming languages themselves. To think that these things are limited to any one product is not seeing the bigger picture.

The reason I called you out Gustav is that you, as so many people do, are labelling much of the learning curve of programming/coding in general as a fault of Fusion. Fusion makes it easy, but practice, experience and planning make projects great. A common problem we see here at Clickteam is that so often people run before they can walk. In itself this is not always bad if you learn from the mistakes you make, but sadly and frequently people instead choose to blame the tool.

Programming IS about trying things out, making mistakes, finding better ways and yes even sometimes having to start the whole project from scratch when you realise you've backed yourself into a corner. Fusion 2.5 does have some limitations of course, we wouldn't be building Fusion 3 if we didn't believe that we could improve on what we already have. That said, we're seeing title after title of professional quality games and apps made in Fusion and people earning cold hard cash when it comes down to it. This conversation is being had for every development tool out there, I guarantee it.

In closing I think this reddit post on the subject of limitations of Unity sums it all up nicely:

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I think from some of your repsonses that you are giving too much credit to game engines for the final product. When you see something that awes you, that is a feat of "Art". Both visual art such as models but also programming art.

Yes, the engine counts, different ones have different limitations, however in the hands of master programmers and artists they find a way to dazzle withing the limits of the software/hardware at hand.

You can do amazing things with Unity but its 90% you that will determine how good your game looks.

I'm not the type to be a fanboy or bias of a particular company and what I'm about to say is my honest opinion about the software. You can see my badges on the left that I own all their software. I just hope I don't get any flack or hate on me for being truthful, but here it goes..

ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 is a great platform to develop your software on if you plan to make things with Windows. This is where it shines the most compared to a lot of other software out there. You can create almost anything in it, not just games, but also windows utilities and so forth. Working on huge games is possible with the Windows exporter, but with other exporters I have ran into countless of problems with the projects I've been working on. You might have better experience if you create everything from scratch without the use of extensions, but with my experience it seems that all the extensions I have worked with have failed to work for me with exporters other than Windows. I heard Fusion 3 will fix a lot of problems that their previous products had, but in the meantime I can not work with Fusion 2.5 until the issues with extensions on mobile devices are fixed. I've been working with Yves to fix as many issues I can with the software and he works hard on it. One of the games I'm working on has a built in level editor, but is broken for the time being...

I started using other software to make the same game about 3 weeks ago just so I can get something released, but when these problems are fixed with Fusion 2.5 I will finish up the game with it and just update it to write over the previous version. If you plan to use extensions for mobile devices I would wait it out until the bugs are fixed and just use pure custom code. This is through my experience and if someone wants to bash me for being honest then I have nothing to say to them.