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I made my old game in MMF2, but I want to start a new project.  There's been some fights over this on these forums before, but if anyone could give me some (relatively) unbiased pros and cons for each, I would be very grateful.
Construct Classic or Construct 2, either one, though I'm looking more at classic since my friend uses it and could help me out along the way.
Thanks!

Construct 2 is more stable than Classic, but I don't like HTML5 games for some reason.

Having used both, I'd prefer Construct. Construct's advantages:
 - Cheaper
 - Actual functional default behaviors. With MMF2, you'd need to make custom movement almost every time.
 - Nicer graphics
 - Designed more in a "programmer's way", with some limited support for functions, splitting events up, more consistent indices, etc.
 - Expression editor not annoying (which really improves the pace of making stuff)

MMF2's advantages:
 - Much more stable. Trust me, this is a huge plus. People keep saying "Construct is more stable than it used to be", but I still get crashes every time I use it.
 - Nicer image editor


Construct also uses Python for scripting, whereas MMF2 uses Lua. Never tried Construct's scripting features. MMF2's is rather annoying and a 3rd party thing. Python's also a better language than Lua, IMO.

You'd need to do scripting to get a decent pace along, because the expression editors for both are really slow to work with. Personally, I use Lua for most of the coding, and MMF2 for the visuals.

Thanks!  I downloaded Construct a few minutes ago, and I'm surprised how similar it is.  I'll start playing around with it, see how I like it.

Could someone tell me which is better for long-term, more complicated projects?  I know from experience that MMF2 can get a bit confusing to make big projects with, especially with multiple frames, but still very possible.  Is Construct better for this?  There doesn't seem to be very many "big" games made with it at all... maybe because of the stability?

scripting in construct is near impossible, it's buggy and poorly implemented.

based on that fact alone I would stay clear of Construct unless you like making games through drop down menus.

construct classic is very nice but it becomes more and more unstable as the game grows in size and memory consumption, that's why some projects starts happy and just become almost impossible to finsh. There are workarounds but they are not obvious to the beginners.
Also construct classic can have some problems to run on some computers if you don't bundle some DLLs with the game, Otherwise it's very nice, I like it a lot.

Unfortunatley the good (classic) version has been more or less abandoned for the crazy HTML5-only gamble that is construct 2 .

As someone who has been making ambitious, complicated projects for a few years with both, I'd say neither. After a certain limit, it breaks down. You'd have to do all kinds of weird hacks like deleting and recreating an object. Nifflas who made the popular Knytt Stories has a long list of the kind of hacks he has to do to optimize MMF2. Eventually, you end up spending more time trying to figure out workarounds than actually making stuff.

Stuff made in either MMF2 or Construct is not easily maintainable. Construct is probably a little more maintainable due to the way it's designed, but too unstable to rely on.

There are some things difficult to live without which neither of them do comfortably. Mainly functions and abstraction. Creating a simple function is frustrating. You'd probably need to look into scripting just to get functions working comfortably. And there's a limit to how fast you can code with just clicking.. the advantage of either is that they let you easily control the look of the game.

Both are great for prototyping because you can build something right off the bat. If you want to make something generic, focusing on art or theme or story, they're the best tools. If you want to create a limited prototype of one gameplay mechanic, they're suitable too.

If allen says Construct scripting isn't good, then I guess MMF is the better choice for long term development :P

Don't get me wrong, I can handle writing code.  I don't know TOO much about Python or Lua,  I haven't coded much with them, but its not too hard for me to figure things out, knowing some code from collage.  What I'm looking for out of these programs is a simpler, faster way to develop games with good visuals.  When I say "larger projects" I mean something like a few (maybe around 3 or 4) months, and fairly simple. 
From what I've seen so far, I think I'll stick with MMF2.  Does anyone else have suggestions?  There's also Game Maker, would that be just downright better than these two?

they're both shitty

I've alternated between MMF1/2 and C1/2 since they came out, used one of them almost every day, and C2 is by far the best designed in every possible way (even though it's not "finished" it's updated several times each month with more features, improvements and fixes). The step from the MMF2 editor to C2 editor is like going from Windows 3 to Windows 7. The downside to C2 is HTML5, but the desktop exe wrapper has okay performance though (runs my HD platformer with thousands of events at 60 fps), though I still need to test it on crap computers.

A few things I like that C2 does better than MMF2:

- Subevents. This feature alone makes it impossible for me to go back to MMF2.
- Better more readable event formatting. Don't have to mouse over boxes to see what's really there!
- Unlimited variables. Also there's no clutter of MMF2's unremovable default variables.
- Local variables. For variables that only exist in subevents/groups etc. very useful.
- Framerate isn't locked. Can do framerate independant code, so 30FPS doesn't run the game at 50% speed.
- Better object picking
- Better and more system expressions. "For each" is especially done more awesome.
- Containers. To do object pairing really efficiently/fast if you need to.
- Better behaviours/movement systems that are flexible, efficient and not buggy.
- Better animation and picture editor. Unlimited action points! No annoying alpha channel stuff.
- Collision polygons. I like this better, allows more flexibilty for where you want collisions
- Event sheets can be linked to each other. Can also make them independant of a scene (frame/layout).
- Improved families (qualifiers in MMF2). Can have the family variables/behaviours as well as independant ones.
- More layer options. Scale, angle.
- Less obscure quirks/bugs.
- Bugs that get fixed really quickly, Ashely listens and implements features/fixes that people ask for.

MMF2 is overpriced as hell. I've tried it through other ... means, and I'd say it's definitely not worth the price tag.

For a more complicated project, yeah, I would say Game Maker is downright better.

Yeah definitely. Although I'd advise against buying Studio (At least right now anyway). Just recently had all my images corrupted because of anti-piracy measures even though I payed ... not fun.

Edit: Probably karma for pirating MMF2 :biglaff:

Agreed. Also, while Game Maker is pretty capable and should be more than enough for most 2D projects, it's not perfect. I once wrote a lengthy review of it, from a more professional development standpoint (I've been using it for years for commercial projects). Check it out, if you want: LINK (http://moacube.com/blog/professional-developers-look-at-gamemaker/).

I'll have to put my word out for Construct 2. I initially didn't like the fact they were focusing on HTML5, but as the software and its capabilities have grown, I've become more and more convinced to the point that I finally bought a personal license last summer.

A bit of background: I practically grew up with Clickteam products - I started with TGF, went on to use MMF and MMF2, then moved to Construct, and now use Construct 2 for my game projects. I've also dabbled with Game Maker in various points of my life, but never really got along with it. A big part of it has to do with the fact that Game Maker's UI is just horrendously outdated - in 2012, you can still see that it was originally designed for resolutions like 640x480 and 800x600. The UI is also all over the place, with edit boxes and setting stuck into whatever window or view had room for them, and features UI delights like vertical tabs (that you can't read without tilting your head). Take a look at this screenshot (http://i.imgbox.com/abqEV7GM.png) for example. Stuff like "Hbor", "Vbor", "Hsp" and "Vsp" are far from self-explanatory, and there's no kind of tooltips whatsoever. The whole UI is full of stuff like this, and it's horrible. (Pretty amusing that GM studio also thought that my copy had been "tampered wirth", when I downloaded the program straight from their page. Looks they still haven't sorted out their DRM issues. (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121127/14455221158/game-maker-studio-drm-misfires-permanently-replaces-created-game-resources-with-pirate-symbols.shtml))

Construct 2, in comparison, is from a whole another dimension. It's actually been built to take use of modern screen sizes efficiently, the UI is a damn lot more consistent and logical and it just all makes much more sense. And it's very usable. And sure, Construct 2 uses its "visual" event system for coding. However, while many GM users tend to deride Construct for this, it's not actually based on the fact that Construct's event system wouldn't be powerful, but rather the fact that GM's event system is total crap. (Just ask any serious GM user and I'm sure they'll agree completely!) Construct's event system on the other hand is very powerful, extendable (Construct has a JavaScript plugin SDK) and also very readable, even in large projects. Here's a screenshot (http://i.imgbox.com/adzIqags.png) of some Construct events, taken from Scirra's Rain Demo (http://www.scirra.com/labs/raindemo/). (Oh, and Construct 2 doesn't come with some heavy-handed DRM. Just in case you were wondering.)

Overall I'd also say that C2's pricing model works out better - while you can buy a copy of GM for pretty cheap, you must pay quite a bit more in order to get full features, and more for additional exporters and such. Construct 2's personal license on the other hand is fully-featured and with HTML5 you can target multiple platforms by default, and the software just keeps getting better and better as time goes on. And Scirra's HTML5 runtime is just amazing, both performance and feature-wise.

Comparing the features of GM Studio and C2, for me the one "notable" difference is that GM has source control tools built in while C2 doesn't, but on the other hand Construct 2's project folders work perfectly fine with any external source control methods. I've done work on a team C2 project using SVN and personal development using Git, and it works out just fine. Though if you're not very familiar with source control and only work by yourself you may not care that much.

So in short, I'd very much recommend going with Construct 2. Since you've used Clickteam products in the past, it should also be relatively easy to get used to, though you'll probably have to unlearn some clickteam-based habits. I'd also not recommend using Construct Classic anymore, since it's kinda unsuitable for larger projects and honestly, while there's some things that I still miss from CC, they're nowhere near big enough for me to not use C2.

you should learn to use something with real scripting so that you can actually learn skills that will translate over to other things when your projects grow in scope, eg game maker or flash

gml is incredibly limited and shitty and flash may be a tad difficult for a first-timer, unless you use flashpunk or something.

personally, I would suggest Unity. javascript(and c#) is really easy to learn and you can do quite a bit with those languages.

and the main reason I suggest it over actionscript is that it has it's own built-in editor and you usually don't have to resort to using other libraries.

I've used MMF, construct classic and construct 2, and construct 2 is everything MMF should have been. In my opinion, there is not one part of MMF that makes it worth using over C2. I don't mean that to diss MMF - I mean that C2 is just that much better in basically every way.

I've been using construct classic for my game loot pursuit, about 3-4 years in development with hundreds of objects, thousands of animation frames and about 10,000 events (would have had thousands less had I known what I was doing when I started). While I can't recommend CC for complex projects, all of the reasons I can't reccommend CC have been addressed in C2.

Html5 bugged me at first too, but I've come around on the issue as its performance has turned out to be better than expected on mobiles (I have a prototype which is working smoothly at 60fps on an ipad 3/iphone4s, though care is still required to optimize), quite good on mid-level desktops and crazy impressive on the newest tech (with a new enough video card, C2 takes advantage of an optimization that makes its rendering about 30% faster than CC!) and the options for exe wrappers and such are steadily improving.

There's a free version, so there's no harm in trying it. Personally, I find C2 a delight to use not only with how easy it is to get stuff up and running, but after having created a complex game with CC, my opinion is it can be also easy to add new features and make bug fixes - but you still have to have good, organized code. C2 won't clean up your code for you. The earlier parts of the code in loot pursuit are an utter mess, but that's my fault since aside from one unfinished shmup it's my first game and I didn't know what I was doing when I started. The newer stuff since I learned how to code properly is very easy to work with and fix. C2 is also far more stable than CC and so therefore it is much easier to rework code.

It's also a delight to be able to preview a game on an iOS device with one click. Great stuff.

I'm not sure why Muz dislikes constuct's implementation of functions - they seem plenty simple and functional to me. Action: call function, condition: on function, do stuff. Calling a function from inside an expression is a bit more complex though, but not that much.

Creating events can be dramatically sped up by using keyboard shortcuts. I think you can even entirely use the keyboard to create events now, though for rearranging them you'll still need to use the mouse at times.

As for learning a scripting language to learn proper programming concepts, C2 does that too. Just from using construct, I learned enough about 'real' programming that I'm able to have conversations with c++ programmers, and they can have a solution to a problem I'm having, and it works.

I keep hearing that argument, but using Construct and the likes sure didn't stop me from "learning skills that will translate over to other things", which has surely proven useful when I've been learning other programming languages. While Scirra claims that Construct requires "no programming", it's really nothing more than marketing - you're still programming with the events (at least if you want to do anything useful). The whole "visual" event system is more like just a really high-level auto-completion system.

when I moved from Construct to Unity I felt like I would have been better off if I learned how to use Game Maker's scripting language rather than using Construct's drop down boxes and menus.

not a terribly big deal, but in hindsight it felt like a mistake to waste time with Construct.

Back when I was learning C# with XNA, it took me about two days to get used to the way things work with it (largely learning how to deal with writing classes). After that I could pretty much directly apply things I had learned from Construct and the like and get results quite quickly. In comparison, it took me more time to get used to JavaScript because the environment of web development was less familiar to me than that of 2D game development. And speaking of which, I'd say the far bigger challenge with Unity is the jump from 2D to 3D rather than from "visual" event programming to fully-written programming (and I say "fully-written" because you still have to do quite a bit of writing work with expressions in Construct, especially if you want to do something more complex). Game Maker wouldn't help you much with that either (unless you were one of those crazy people doing hacky 3D stuff with GM, I guess).

the other thing is that unless you type under 30wpm, it'll probably be faster to use scripting than it will be to use construct's shitty drop down menus, it'll be easier to edit stuff, and it'll probably be easier to debug, although not so much with game maker. and yeah, game maker might be shitty, but it's infinitely less shitty than mmf2 or construct. also, both javascript and as3 are based on the same thing (ecmascript), so i don't see why either one would be that much easier or harder to learn than the other.

good advice. especially in regards to c#, which translates to several other engines.

You need a lot of clicks and dropdowns to use a function, which defeats the purpose of it being a quick access thing.

I'd like to be able to simply write "doSomething(value1, value2)" without any clicking. IIRC, Construct requires a lot of clicking for each variable you put in. I think it took me like 20 minutes just to put implement a simple 'roll dice' function. Way too long for something that would take 2 minutes at most with typical scripting.

But I'm talking about Construct Classic. Maybe Construct 2's is better.

Does C2 still use Python?

20 minutes? Did that include the time to make the events the function ran as well? Because in C2, making a 'call function' action with a perameter and then a 'on function' event only took me 30 seconds, and that's while using c2 on an ipad using Remote Desktop software (which it actually works surprisingly well on) and making multiple mistaps.  Including inserting the function object into the project, maybe 35 (that's not including the events the function runs, of course, as that could be any amount of them, this is just setting up the function itself). C2 has integrated adding perameters into the 'call function' window where you type the function name, so that's made adding them more efficient. CC wouldn't have taken more than about 5-10 seconds longer, though.

C2 doesn't have any integrated scripting like CC did, but JavaScript can be used through the SDK.

I think it probably included some crashes and having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Was a year ago, so I don't remember. Maybe a one-off thing, but it put me off Construct for good :P

I hear ya. Unless you know how to dodge the instability, CC can be quite frustrating at times. If you ever change your mind about HTML5 though, C2 is vastly improved, especially on the stability front.

Actually, MMF2 also has Python scripting via a extension. If scripting is a benefit MMF2 also allows Basic, Javascript, dotnet/c# also as well as various extensions which work well in combination for things like CSV, SQL and XML etc.

For custom extensions both MMF2 and Construct allow C++ (Exe) but as MMF2 has multiple exporters you can also use C# (XNA), AS3 (Flash), Java and i think C/Xcode for IOS so in my opinion it offers much more choices and a better choice for scripters.

Last time i checked the Clickteam forum they were talking about HTML5, Android, Ouya and Playstation Vita exporters being made also and i think MMF3 is currently being made, so i guess they will have SDKs for those also.

Yet it still doesn't have such basic things as subevents!

My answer would be: "It depends"

If the OP wants to develop skills and won't mind getting his hands dirty on code/script, hack away solutions to problems that can be trivial and a lot of reading while learning a language (whether a full blown programming or scripting one), then go for the one that lets you do whatever the hell you want with it.

If you want to get things done without getting your head under the hood, go for the simpler one and run with it.

I tried my hand at GameMaker 8.1 (licensed) and GM: Studio (free) and it's just to damn messed up in it's UI for me to get to grips with. For me GM has become obsolete, even after GM: Studio's launch. It has improved but enough. It should have been a complete overhaul in the interface, not a hack in the same old interface.

I have C2 licensed and it's so easy to get things done it's almost ridiculous. It has become my main choice, but I have to agree it is more suited to simpler, smaller creations. Of course, I have some other more "full-blown" solutions available, but I can only recommend C2. Them Gullen boys are impressively supportive and actually believe their tool. I just wish for a true .exe compiler.

Also, it's damned cheap.