Ashley's Forum Posts

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  • That used to be the standard in some older games and tools, but these days we've got full 8-bit alpha channels

  • MS Paint doesn't have alpha support - I'd recommend Paint.NET. We're still working on a built-in image editor which will of course support alpha!

  • Djordhan, of course - we're just working very quickly towards a basic but fully functional program first. We'll come back and add missing features soon.

  • Download Construct 2 public preview 38.2

    Link to release 37

    (r38 accidentally broke XP support - it's fixed in this release. The rest of this post is a copy-paste from r38.)

    Tiled background is new to this build! First, though, a little bit of eye candy: it's a minor cosmetic change, but objects in the editor now have full edge smoothing. It looks like antialiasing, but technically isn't quite the same (it's sort of blending the edges with the background). Just a nice-to-have.

    <img src="http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases/r38a.png">

    You can also set the browser you want to launch for preview in project properties. Right now, I'd recommend Internet Explorer 9 even if it's not your day-to-day browser - it definitely has the fastest and best quality canvas at the moment. You can get it via Windows Update on Vista or 7. On XP, Firefox 4 seems to be next best. Chrome is an excellent browser overall but its canvas is a little behind the others - it's a bit slow and pixellated. I'm sure they'll catch up eventually though.

    So: tiled background. This has two big improvements over the Classic tiled background:

    • You can rotate it!
    • There is no power-of-two requirement!

    For the second point (power-of-two) - Classic couldn't tile non-power-of-two textures (NPOT) properly. Modern graphics cards have supported NPOT textures for a while now. C2's OpenGL renderer has been designed to take full advantage of this. This means textures of any size tile seamlessly at any zoom or angle. All browsers except Safari can do the same too (I'm sure Safari will fix theirs soon). Even Sprites are using NPOT textures behind the scenes. In short, in C2, you can forget about power-of-two textures completely. There's no change in functionality or VRAM saving whatsoever!

    One more thing: whenever we get round to an OpenGL (desktop) exporter for C2, both the edge-smoothing and NPOT tiled background will carry over to that as well, since it'll use the same renderer.

    Changelog

    • [Add] Tiled background plugin. Rotatable, seamless and no power-of-two requirement.
    • [Add] 'Preview browser' setting to project properties. Can choose which browser launches out of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, providing they're installed, or leave at system default browser. The setting persists, which is great if like me you want to browse the web in Chrome, but use IE9's canvas for preview, which is better right now.
    • [Change] Insert Object dialog now groups plugins in to their categories.
    • [Change] Layout view: Sprites previously had half-smoothed edges in the editor (sort of like antialiasing but cut off half way). They now have full-smoothed edges for better quality.
    • [Change] Rearranged layer properties in to two groups - editor properties (only affect its use in the editor) and layer properties (affect the layer at runtime).

    (- [Fix] r38 broke XP support)

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  • I've found a Vista function I accidentally used that broke XP support. Fix coming shortly.

    Arima: it will probably incur a small performance hit, but I don't think it will be significant. It effectively puts a 1-pixel transparent border around the texture, but without changing the texture (by tweaking the texture co-ordinates and draw quad). That's a little bit of math but there's no reason it can't be pre-processed for the runtime to make any performance impact very small.

  • It works for me on my Windows 7 dev machine, but I might have accidentally added in a Vista/7-only feature. Can anyone confirm it works OK on Vista/7? I'm not sure what it is I've done but I'll pick through my changes and figure it out.

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  • [s:2te0pjpk]Download Construct 2 public preview 38[/s:2te0pjpk]

    Link to release 37

    Edit: Seems to be a botched build, update coming soon... if you're feeling adventurous you can still try downloading here.

    Tiled background is new to this build! First, though, a little bit of eye candy: it's a minor cosmetic change, but objects in the editor now have full edge smoothing. It looks like antialiasing, but technically isn't quite the same (it's sort of blending the edges with the background). Just a nice-to-have.

    <img src="http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases/r38a.png">

    You can also set the browser you want to launch for preview in project properties. Right now, I'd recommend Internet Explorer 9 even if it's not your day-to-day browser - it definitely has the fastest and best quality canvas at the moment. You can get it via Windows Update on Vista or 7. On XP, Firefox 4 seems to be next best. Chrome is an excellent browser overall but its canvas is a little behind the others - it's a bit slow and pixellated. I'm sure they'll catch up eventually though.

    So: tiled background. This has two big improvements over the Classic tiled background:

    • You can rotate it!
    • There is no power-of-two requirement!

    For the second point (power-of-two) - Classic couldn't tile non-power-of-two textures (NPOT) properly. Modern graphics cards have supported NPOT textures for a while now. C2's OpenGL renderer has been designed to take full advantage of this. This means textures of any size tile seamlessly at any zoom or angle. All browsers except Safari can do the same too (I'm sure Safari will fix theirs soon). Even Sprites are using NPOT textures behind the scenes. In short, in C2, you can forget about power-of-two textures completely. There's no change in functionality or VRAM saving whatsoever!

    One more thing: whenever we get round to an OpenGL (desktop) exporter for C2, both the edge-smoothing and NPOT tiled background will carry over to that as well, since it'll use the same renderer.

    Changelog

    • [Add] Tiled background plugin. Rotatable, seamless and no power-of-two requirement.
    • [Add] 'Preview browser' setting to project properties. Can choose which browser launches out of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, providing they're installed, or leave at system default browser. The setting persists, which is great if like me you want to browse the web in Chrome, but use IE9's canvas for preview, which is better right now.
    • [Change] Insert Object dialog now groups plugins in to their categories.
    • [Change] Layout view: Sprites previously had half-smoothed edges in the editor (sort of like antialiasing but cut off half way). They now have full-smoothed edges for better quality.
    • [Change] Rearranged layer properties in to two groups - editor properties (only affect its use in the editor) and layer properties (affect the layer at runtime).

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  • It's an early release so there are likely to be bugs. I guess they'll be fixing problems in the long run.

  • Wow, at last Looks like a well thought out toolkit. Congrats to them for finally launching.

    I'm very curious about it. The eventing looks almost identical to construct to me, aside from the graphics.

    I think it's completely different actually - the Scratch block system has no concept of selected object lists as far as I know, which is how the Construct event system fundamentally works.

    Kiyoshi - looks like they fixed some of the problems you noted - for example, it looks like you can draw collision polygons (although there's still a giant list of co-ordinates in the UI - no idea why that'd ever be useful).

    My main criticism, from my incredibly biased position of writing a competing dev tool , is that it's mixing the Scratch event block system, which was originally designed for children, with a full blown code editor to program your game. Who are they targeting exactly - kids or programmers? I'm not sure if this is a strength or a weakness, but Game Maker is technically an event/coding hybrid, and in the end one of them "won" (most people consider it a scripting tool). I wonder what Stencyl's thoughts are on how the hybrid thing will work out.

    Construct Classic has python scripting, but it's been rightly criticised as an afterthought - Construct (1 and 2) have always been almost entirely about their event systems.

    Still, I'm impressed how many people they've got on the website even after being publicly inactive for so long! Looks like they're doing well.

    Has anyone tried it in comparison to Gamesalad? I don't have a Mac.

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