althea_texas's Forum Posts

  • Thanks! I've been away from C3 for the past eighteen months and am excited about digging into this new functionality.

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  • Hey Wacky Toaster -- Quick question: Using an invisible sprite to handle collisions for the player object is pretty easy to implement with an 'every tick' event. It's more complicated when we have multiple instances of an enemy object. What would you recommend as a strategy for keeping the collision box instance tethered to the enemy sprite instance? Should we use containers?

  • Ah! Fantastic. We're using an invisible sprite to handle collisions with player, so it's easy enough to do the same thing with the enemies. Thank you!

  • Thanks, wackyToaster! I just fixed the permissions issue on that file so you should now be able to view it.

  • A student in my games class is implementing a basic platform game following the same basic guidelines that are at the core of the official C3 tutorial for this type of game. (The only difference is that we're using sprites to create the environment rather than using tile maps for the environment.)

    Enemy movement is handled by simulating platform controls and using collision with an invisible barrier to reverse the direction.

    This is mostly working but the enemy is falling through the island when it reverses direction. Everything is fine when we make the terrain 'solid' instead of 'jump-through,' but we want to have jump through functionality.

    The link to her C3P is:

    trinitycommdepartment.com/~adelwich/temp/falling-through-jumpthru.c3p

  • Thank you, everyone. This is exactly what I needed to know!

  • Thanks, Newt! You mentioned that Tiled BG is better for areas with texture and Tilemap is better for lots of platforms, roads and buildings. Is the only noticeable difference in the creation phase when the developer is designing the layout? Or are there also differences related to code and ease of collision detection?

  • I use Construct 3 in an undergraduate communication course focused on game design and criticism. Once students understand the basics of the application, their first game design assignment asks them to create their own platform game.

    In the past, following the recommendations of the original Construct 3 tutorial, I have encouraged students to create islands, ladders, and other elements of the game environment by loading a tile sheet with environmental elements into a single sprite. Each environmental object is a different frame of the sprite, the speed of the animation is set to zero, and students design the environment by dragging sprite instances around the layout and selecting frames accordingly.

    However, I noticed that the most recent platformer tutorial on the Construct site suggests using the tilemap object instead of using sprite instances. If this is the preferred workflow, I will encourage my students to use this approach, but I'm wondering what others think about this.

    What are the advantages or disadvantages of using tilemaps to create the environment in a platform game? Is it just a case of "six of one, half dozen the other?" Or are there clear advantages to one approach?

  • Once a year, I teach an introductory game programming course to students using Construct 3. Since I'm not really immersed in C3 during the rest of the year, it's always fun to come back to the platform so I can teach myself about new functionality.

    I realize that I can consult all of the release notes to find out about every single thing that has been changed, but I'm really interested in knowing more about how the C3 developer community views recent changes. If anyone has opinions about these questions, I would love to hear your thoughts!

    • What are some of the most important changes to Construct 3 that have emerged during the past year or two?
    • How are things going with the timeline editor and tweens? Should we be striving to use these tools for animation instead of the movement behaviors we relied on before the timeline editor was introduced?
    • What about the tile movement behavior that was introduced in late 2018? This seems like a great way of avoiding all sorts of collision detection errors.
    • The scene graph looks *so* cool, and I know it is very new. Is it ready for prime time?
    • Have interactive dialogue trees become any easier, or do we still need to engage in JSON acrobatics and third-party tools to make it work smoothly? (Not criticizing C3 for this. Just remembering that this was often the most difficult part when helping students implement their game ideas.)
    • Should I now be teaching my students to use function maps from the get-go?
    • How are things going in terms of JavaScript integration with C3? When would folks want to code in JS instead of using the C3 visual tools?

    I realize that there are many questions here and am interested in any thoughts people have about *any* of these questions. Thank you!

  • As always, "Thanks, dop2000!"

  • I'm positive that I've done this with C3 in the past, but I have spent at least 20 minutes fruitlessly searching for the ability to align objects in relation to each other.

    I'm selecting objects on the layout, right-clicking, and navigating the alignment options. I thought there used to be an option that would toggle between "align to layout" and "align to other objects." There are now options that allow us to distinguish between "align to layout" and "align to viewport," but I cannot find the "align to object" option.

  • This is FANTASTIC. Thank you, Laura!

  • This is *so* helpful. Thank you so much, Kayatric and Laura.

    Also, it makes me feel better to know that I'm not the only person who was terrified by the JSON file generated by that tool. :)

  • What a great coincidence!

  • Thanks for these resources!