althea_texas's Forum Posts

  • Glad to hear this, Ashley! Looking forward to bringing my small cohort of students back into the world of Construct next semester! :)

  • I am a college professor who occasionally teaches a game development class to liberal arts students. Construct 3 (and C2) have been great tools which make it possible for students to learn basic coding concepts while creating their own games. at the end of the semester, I encourage them to branch out and learn other coding languages and tool kits to supplement the work that they are doing with Construct 3.

    It has been two years since I last used the tool, and I am starting to think about a class that I will teach in Spring 2025. I am just wondering how other community members feel about the ongoing viability of this platform. I know how hard Ashley and all of the Scirra folks work to make this a robust platform. I also know that it must be very expensive to keep this tool afloat, even with the subscription model.

    Do people think that this will continue to be a viable solution for my games class through June 2025? It seems like people are still active in the forums. I’m not sure if they are more or less active than they were two years ago.

    Tagged:

  • In many of the Construct 3 platform game tutorials, the authors recommend handling enemy movement by a) using the 'simulate platform' action to move the enemy, b) using an instance variable to handle direction of movement, and c) checking for collisions with invisible boundary sprites in order to know when the enemy needs to change direction.

    The first two items make perfect sense, but I've often encountered weird janky glitches when students use invisible boundary sprites to handle enemy movement calculations. In any given class of 15 students, at least one or two students is likely to encounter glitches which cause their enemies to randomly plummet off the platforms in unexpected ways. Sometimes, this seems to be a function of the frame rate. At other times, it has to do with the collision areas not lining up correctly. In some cases, the student has *never* been able to solve the problem and the C3 forums have also been at a loss to solve the problem.

    It seems like a more reliable way of handling this situation might be the addition of minimumX and maximumX instance variables in the enemy sprites. Then, the programmer simply needs to update the values of these instances once when they are populating their layouts. From that point forward, the direction calculations should work just fine without any weird glitches.

    Does this seem like a plausible alternative to invisible collision boxes? Am I overlooking something?

  • Aha! Followed R0J0hound's advice and created a text object to display frames per second. Sure enough, the FPS is something like 240 fps on the problematic machine. It's a solid 60 fps on other machines. Checked display settings under Windows 10 and realized that the refresh rate on that monitor was cranked up to 240 Hz. Dropped it down to 60 Hz and everything works perfectly.

  • Thanks for the suggestions. Can't wait to check these possibilities out when I get back to the lab. :)

  • Follow-up: We moved the student to a different machine in the lab and it also worked on that machine.

  • I'm helping my students troubleshoot basic platform games. One student is setting up her platformer with an enemy that moves back and forth, flipping direction when it encounters a barrier. Her event sheet is absolutely correct, sprites are clean, origin points are consistent, etc.

    When I opened and tested her game on the podium computer (an identical machine), everything worked just fine. When we test the game on her machine, the enemy fails to detect collision with the transparent barrier and falls to its death.

    I thought there might be some crud in the browser cache causing problems, so she connected to her C3 account from a different browser. The game still doesn't work on that machine but it works just fine when I test the *identical* file on the instructor podium computer.

    Has anyone ever encountered this sort of glitch before?

  • Found it. Thanks!

  • Oh! Have they been folded into tutorials and wrapped with more comprehensive explanations?

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  • It has been a minute -- technically 788,400 minutes -- since I last immersed myself in Construct 3. Back in 2021, there was a cool collection of tiny examples linked to the launch page. These mini-examples demonstrated how to use individual behaviors and discussed some of the cool visual display effects.

    Are these examples still available? I've searched the main tutorials page but haven't seen those tiny little example explanations.

  • Tried logging out and logging in with the Google option. That didn't work, but I figured out the solution. In case anyone else encounters the issue, I needed to select "edit profile" and then look for the OAUTH option to link my Google account while I was logged in with my C3 username.

    Thanks, Ashley! Excited about digging back into C3 with my students.

  • I've had a C3 account for quite a while. It's linked to a school account that is powered by Google. I'm able to use the automatic Google sign-on to access other services such as Github or Digital Ocean, but cannot log on to C3 this way.

    How can I just automatically connect to C3 when I'm already logged on to my Google account? This is important to me because the system constantly logs me off and I have to log on at least twice to get started.

  • It's not really like that. The student has been checking in on Discord throughout the week as they've been working on the project.

  • Today, students presented their individual platform game projects to the class via Zoom web conferencing. Overall, presentations went well, but one student encountered a bug which only seems manifest when they shared their screen via Zoom.

    They write, "[After class, I] kept starting the game up trying to recreate the issue and it would not occur. I even left the game running for a few minutes to see if it was just random timing and none of the drones fell off. Then I started up my own zoom call and shared my screen and played the game while it was being screen shared and the drones begin to fall again. I tested it multiple times and every time the game is being played through screen share it doesn't work."

    They add, "So I've also tested a few other things, if the game was started before I start screen sharing, starting a screen share will cause the bug, and even if I'm not screen sharing but if I open another program such as discord it causes one drone to fall but not all of them. It seems like the issue is tied to my computer running other programs while the game is playing so I don't really know how to fix that."

    I haven't had a chance to replicate the problem on my end and will continue to work with the student to trouble shoot, but it seemed like it could be helpful to ask folks in the forums if they have heard of similar problems related to screen sharing in the past.

    Thanks!

  • I know! I'm a college professor who teaches on other topics as well, so most of my time is focused on other things. About once a year -- or once every 18 months -- I get the opportunity to immerse myself in C3 for the games class. It's always impressive to see how many new features have been rolled out during my absence from the community.