Ashley's Forum Posts

  • You have to register a Sourceforge account to post bug reports. I'm sorry but I disagree completely with this thread. The tracker provides much better tools for dealing with bugs such as filtering by open/closed status and assigning to particular developers. A forum simply does not cut it. It's up to you to post a tracker items. If you don't the problem might not get looked at! What's so hard about it anyway?

  • The whole reason the tracker exists is that forum posts get lost and forgotten much, much more easily than a single central list of bug reports. And I really don't think it's harder to post a bug report than a forum post. Why not just report issues when you come across them?

  • Have you tried the latest unstable build, 0.99.84?

  • Why are you so sure the events are causing the delay? Compiling events is a very simple and fast process, unlike compressing a large amount of texture data to PNG. If you delete all your events, does the preview speed up?

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  • <img src="http://www.scirra.com/glitch.png">

    This is exactly what bad drivers or graphics card errors look like, see the diagonal artefacts? Until those go away, I'm afraid I'm convinced there's something wrong with the rendering on your computer - not a Construct issue.

  • Just a heads up, make sure you get yourself a good deal. I think a lot of this type of company will have pretty harsh terms and take most of the profit.

  • Yeah, just use a lossless format (ie. not jpeg, it's lossy).

  • That's a great thing to do anyway - if you type up a long post in response to someone on the forum, chances are you can slightly edit it and put it on the wiki as well. I've tried to get more people writing on the wiki, but only a couple of people are involved, it'd be nice if more people did contribute, since there's a lot of highly knowledgable people here who only write on the forum.

  • Your game could end up using more VRAM than Crysis, and that's not a joke. 3D games are very efficient with textures - they can recycle the same textures over and over and over, and due to 3D models, lighting, shaders etc. they can keep it looking interesting. One tilable wood texture could be used on a log cabin, a forest of trees, a floor somewhere, a handle, tables, chairs, and so on.

    Contrast that to a game composed entirely out of unique 1024x1024 textures, where there's no texture re-use. Your game is effectively a single, gigantic texture, which graphics cards don't tend to have enough memory for. On a card with 64mb VRAM, which you should support for integrated or older graphics hardware, you can fit sixteen 1024x1024 textures in memory (one is 4mb). And that's assuming it was empty to begin with, and it's not.

    I'm not sure Crysis supports such low-end cards, but in theory a 3D game could just switch to ultra-low-res-crappy mode, using 256x256 textures for the 3D models. Then they can fit in 256 textures, which is probably enough for a small level. Note you can fit thousands of vertices of a 3D model in 1mb, enough for a lot of world or several models, so 3D stuff gets away with that much easier. Will you have a low-resolution version? Graphics cards don't have much memory since 3D games don't need it, so designing your game with such a lot of texturing is probably a bad idea.

  • I think you missed this recent thread on twitter - better to post your account there and keep everything in one place I think! So I'll close this thread.

  • It's impossible for the display to change while the screen is being drawn if V-Sync is enabled - it's designed specifically to prevent that. My best guess is your events are switching between animation frames every tick. Post a .cap.

  • I think that's dependent on whether your graphics card supports rectangular power-of-two textures - it might not work on someone else's video card that doesn't support it.

  • This question seems to come up a lot. I guess the point/linear sampling setting is important to a lot of people but it's hidden half way down application properties. How about a prompt like this when clicking File -> New?:

    What graphics style would you like to use for this game? You can change this any time in Application Properties under 'Sampling'.

    ( ) Retro style (point sampling) - hard edges on graphics to retain pixellated look

    ( ) Modern style (linear sampling) - smooth edges for higher quality display, but can make pixel art appear blurry

    ([ ] Don't ask me again)

    Would that be useful?

  • Can you reproduce the crash in a blank .cap? That's absolutely crucial. Complicated .caps with lots of objects are far too complicated to debug, so the first thing I do with .caps like that is try to reduce them to the sole problem on its own. It can take a while though.

  • I think all graphics cards can support 1024x1024 textures, so for greater convenience you can cut textures in to chunks of that size. If you have edges to cover, you can cut them in to say 256x256 squares and they will use less VRAM than another 1024x1024 texture. Basically, the rule of thumb is to assume your texture is placed on the smallest square power-of-two size surface that can entirely fit your image (so 1024x50 size textures is probably a bad idea - it could use 1024x1024 size surface and waste VRAM - but some modern cards might be able to use rectangular power of two and place it on 1024x64).

    But as Davioware said, you'll very quickly run out of VRAM this way. If you want low-end hardware to be able to play your game, you need to be thinking about 64mb cards, of which only 32mb may be available for your game to use (the rest used by OS, other apps etc). It's better to use tiling where you can, and add variations with scaled, rotated sprites for decoration. You can still get an interesting appearance that way, and with a much lower VRAM usage.

    The tiled background object with a power-of-two size texture is a very efficient way to tile an image (it draws as fast as a single texture no matter how much you tile it). You lose that if it's not using a power-of-two size texture though.