Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Events will very rarely be the bottleneck of your game. Almost always, you can assume the rendering is going to be what slows your game down, if anything.

    Read the article - it explains how quite often the events will actually have zero impact on your game's performance.

  • I've just moved in to my new house for this year of uni. However the internet isn't installed until wednesday. I'm on at the library right now, but hopefully back to normal soon! (I'll try not to suffer any withdrawal symptoms)

    Has anyone seen that episode of South Park? "I'm gonna head out west, find me some internet..."

  • Parallaxing is a good way to go - if there are 3 levels of scenery moving at different speeds when the screen scrolls, you get a much better feel of depth than a completely flat level. Dropshadows (use the Dropshadow object, not the effect, it's faster and doesnt use pixel shaders) can also add some depth too.

    Blur horizontal/blur vertical are the two slowest effects. I'd avoid them except where absolutely necessary if you can. They can be optimised though and I'll try to do it soon.

  • Family object picking works like normal object picking: if you have

    + Family Red 'Health' less or equal 0

    -> Destroy Family Red

    then only objects from the family Red with 'Health' <= 0 get destroyed. They shouldn't all be indiscriminately destroyed. If they are, it might be a bug, so upload a .cap showing this behaviour and I'll take a look.

    The way family private variables work is like this. Suppose you have 'SpriteA' and 'SpriteB' in family 'Red'. The private variables available in Red are the ones common to both SpriteA and SpriteB. So if you have:

    SpriteA's variables: VarA, VarB, VarC

    SpriteB's variables: VarA, VarB

    then via the family Red, you can access VarA and VarB, because all objects in the family have them. You can't access VarC: if you did 'Set VarC to 5', SpriteB doesn't have a VarC, so it's impossible to carry out this action. However, in ordinary non-family events referring to SpriteA, you can still use VarC like a normal private variable.

    The Family Manager dialog allows you to add and remove private variables to all the objects in the family at the same time. If you have 17 objects in family Red and you want to have a new variable 'VarD', you don't want to have to add 'VarD' individually to 17 objects. So you just hit 'Add new family variable' and add 'VarD', and it adds it to all of them. Because all of them have the variable in common, it becomes a family variable.

    I should note families keep a separate record of which objects are picked in the events. So if you have:

    + Bullet collides with family 'Red'

    -> Destroy SpriteA (which is in family 'Red')

    then this event treats SpriteA as unpicked by the event, so all SpriteAs will be destroyed. If you want to use only the objects affected by the event, choose an action under the 'Red' family in the event wizard (eg. Family 'Red': Destroy).

    Hope that explains it!

  • We get this request from time to time. The Windows version isn't even at 1.0 yet - it should definitely be completed and mature before we go porting it anywhere. Also, porting an application as large as Construct is a complex and very time-consuming task. Construct is developed primarily by three volunteers in our spare time (most of us are doing full time university courses as well), so we just don't have enough coders.

    If you want a mac or linux version you have one viable option:

    • Find a mac or linux programmer to do the port. Construct is open source, so anybody can do this.

  • You should be able to, but global objects dont seem quite with it at the moment. I'll try have that sorted soon.

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  • Not yet, on the todo list.

  • How much video memory do you have? I guess running that app in the VM will tell you what the VM thinks - you need at least 64MB of VRAM to be able to run Construct effectively.

  • That's right, you can refer to layers by name as well. Anywhere you put a layer number, you can also put a layer name. And so long as you keep the same name, the layer ordering doesn't matter.

  • That's awesome! It's a slinky!

  • They're deleted now. I'm not sure how these bots get through the captcha and email verification. They're either clever bots, or real people being paid for it!

  • You don't need the physics behavior for this. If you make the ghosts have a Ball movement instead of Bullet, you can set them to bounce off solids, and insert your wall and mark it as solid.

    Alternatively just have an event like

    + Ghost collides with wall

    -> Set ghost angle to Ghost.Angle + 180

    That'll turn it round the other way if it touches the wall.

  • Following an object is easy enough - give your objects a bullet or ball movement, and always make them rotate towards the object to follow (always - rotate angle towards object). If its an object of the same object type, it might be a little trickier.

  • I doubt it is a problem with anyone's mouse. The mouse is a pretty reliable piece of technology in a PC, and I don't think Construct's quite at that point yet

    I have experienced IDE lockups once or twice on startup. It seems to be related to trying to use the menu when its checking for updates, but I'm not sure and haven't ever had it stop responding to clicks after some use.

  • Can you get it reproducable and send a .cap file that can make it happen reliably? These things are usually easy to fix - so long as I can get it to happen for me...