Arima's Forum Posts

  • 12 extra layers should absolutely not cause a 40% increase in CPU use, especially on an i5. My game has somewhere around 20 layers and when running on an old amd Athlon 4400+, the CPU low point is around 35%, and that's also running the thousands of events in the event sheet at the same time (not all the events are running each tick, of course).

    I'm not sure what's causing it, though. Are you using layer effects? Forcing the layers to have their own texture? Try making a copy of your capx and experiment, delete everything except the layers, try deactivating all the events, turning all the layer's settings back to their defaults, etc.

  • I don't understand what information you're looking for. There are plenty of examples of big complex games on mobiles (various final fantasies, Star Wars KOTOR, etc), and as such there's clearly a market for them (though there are also clearly many more smaller, less complex games). Why do you want to know specifically if the people here in the scirra community have played them? That's such a small potion of mobile gamers, I'm not sure what you're trying to determine. Could you clarify that?

    I can delete games again. Post away. Remember though you can upload a new version without needing to upload a whole separate game.

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  • I've tried, but for some odd reason can't find any mention of it. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I recall seeing a couple project's videos on kickstarter and thinking about how much I want youtube to support 60 fps because the framerate looked great (I'm really fussy about video quality). I can't remember what those projects were called, though. :/

  • Actually, I think kickstarter videos can be at 60 fps.

  • This is an English speaking forum, please stick to English or provide a translation with your post.

  • Hmm... Maybe it could be an option to generate the mipmaps when exporting the game from C2? It would increase the download size (I've read mipmaps add 33%, don't know if that's correct or not) but improve startup times, and large games are quite common these days so 33% more image data might not matter for some users (for example, those making a downloadable exe, and the current fix increases download size too). My point is I think it's better to increase the download size rather than the memory use.

    Also, does C2 generate mipmaps when previewing?

  • Ashley - Right, that makes sense. One more question, if you don't mind - I wonder if there's a way to generate mipmaps by isolating each animation frame to its own texture when creating the mipmaps (by either cropping the rest off or copying/pasting that singular animation frame to a new texture, then resizing it, then pasting it back to the spritesheet)? Then it wouldn't average pixels from adjacent images because there wouldn't be any.

    Since the problem only happens on export, and sprite sheets only happen on export, having the textures isolated solves the issue, so I'm basically wondering if you can make that isolating behavior happen from a spritesheet at mipmap generation time.

    Or, as newt said, perhaps giving us an option to turn sprite sheets off would be optimal for some users? Or would that essentially make no difference by resulting in the same amount of memory used as putting them all in power of 2 locations? I guess if that's the case then the only difference would be more file requests which is a disadvantage.

  • Ashley - I assume it's already been considered, but I'm curious for technical reasons, why doesn't an extra few pixels width invisible border added between textures on a spritesheet solve the problem? Why does it need to go all the way up to power of two padding and waste so much space? I realize 1 pixel wouldn't work because it's averaging the space from multiple pixels.

  • Shards update

    So I wanted the player to have the ability to run from an incoming attack, and hide behind an enemy to have that enemy get hit instead. It seemed like a good idea at first, until I realized that when enemies are bunched up they can be significantly more dangerous to each other than the player is, especially when they're using area affect attacks. So dangerous that it's too significant of an advantage for the player as they blow themselves up.

    To negate this, I'd have to at least implement line of sight for the enemies, which isn't a problem, but it would still be a pretty 'stupid' check because I'm not good enough of a coder to write an ai that'll check what units will be in the way by the time the attack gets there (especially since units change their minds about what they're doing frequently), so I'm thinking that's one feature the game is going to have to go without.

    The combo mode is implemented!

    You can now string attacks together, unpause the game and watch them play out. Alternately you can leave combo mode off and input them one at a time for one click command input and resuming of action (I've been trying to reduce the number of clicks needed to as few as possible to streamline the ui).

    In a lot of RPGs, there are abilities you can select from a list which are essentially a string of attacks that play out exactly the same each time. That doesn't give the player any interesting choices other than the initial choice of using that combo rather than another.

    There are games out there that let you make your own combos, but in the ones I've seen there isn't much difference between which attacks the player uses. A punch will do damage, and so will a kick.

    In Shards, you get to make your own combos, and each move has its own advantages and disadvantages. Normal attacks are quick but weak. Spin slashing hits in 360 degrees, but uses more sp and has a higher recovery time, which isn't good if an opponent blocks it. Hitting harder causes more damage and knocks the enemy back, but isn't as quick to hit with, uses more sp and has a higher recovery time.

    Advantages and disadvantages to each, and no one move is always superior. Interesting choices!

    Next step

    I think I'm getting close to the point where the game is ready for a first video, I just need to fix a few bugs and make some animations so the characters aren't performing all their actions in the same pose.

  • Please do not create multiple topics for the same question.

  • Oh right, good point. I didn't think about tiles with transparency.

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  • Ashley - I realize this isn't an optimal solution, but what about having an option for 'two pass' rendering, one pass being the tile map offset by 1 pixel on each axis, the second pass the tile map is rendered again in its normal location?

    It would double the pixels to draw so wouldn't be a good choice for low powered mobile devices, but desktop graphics cards are so powerful these days, it might be worth it for some people.

    Although I suppose people could do that manually already, so maybe it's not worth implementing.