Ashley's Forum Posts

  • What events are you using to play the selected song?

  • Well in theory all those things can be coded in software mode without DirectX (the linear filtered rotations, zooming etc) but a lot of them would be prohibitively slow on a CPU. The graphics hardware is much much more efficient at these tasks, so if you don't use DirectX and the graphics hardware and stick to the CPU, you can end up with 1-2 FPS fairly easily with these kinds of effects going on.

    Games should still run fairly well on old computers. The Geforce 2 32mb graphics card is extremely old, and can still run Construct games at a playable rate, so long as you keep to "cheap" rendering - don't zoom the screen, just scale, rotate and use alpha blended sprites. Even very old hardware can do that just fine. If you're worried about performance on very old computers, completely avoid shaders - old hardware simply won't support them even if they can run DirectX 9 games. You can, however, use some shaders, and set them up to disable if the hardware doesn't support them - see Effects in Construct.

    I don't see much use in implementing an older DirectX version - once you've got DirectX 9, even very old computers can run the games.

  • The framerate is the temporal-antialiased framerate, which means the V-sync rate is 1/5th the framerate for 5x motion blur, and 1/20th for 20x motion blur. So yes, 100fps at 20x motion blur is actually 5 FPS V-Sync rate. Interestingly, low framerates are much more tolerable with motion blur on, because you're not seeing a series of slides - you can see the motion too.

  • Here's a demo of the motion blur. You can press:

    1 - Turn off motion blur for comparison

    2 - Default (5x) motion blur

    3 - 20x motion blur (ridiculously high, puts your graphics card through its paces!)

    Look round with the mouse and left click to shoot, arrow keys to move, featuring a cool zooming camera. Notice you can't see behind you if you look as far as you can one way!

    Could do with some more comments but hey...

  • Try opening regedit, and delete the whole HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Construct key. Restart Construct, and it should be back to default dialog sizes and layouts.

  • I'm pretty sure it got fixed for Casho's file - have you got a different .cap which demonstrates this bug Arima?

  • Well the host seemed to be having some kind of problem and we were down for longer... hopefully things are fixed now

  • DirectX 9 actually makes a lot more possible than you probably realised. I do understand that for retro style games you don't really need anything special, which is why we have an SDL renderer in the works, that runs only in software. However, it won't support any of the following:

    • Pixel shaders
    • Motion blur
    • Linear filtered rotations/scaling/positioning
    • Zooming or rotating the display or individual layers
    • Layer effects/opacity/filters

    Even having a game with large objects, or just lots of alpha channelled objects, would run unacceptably slow without DirectX. The CPU can draw graphics, but it's pretty poor at doing it - which is why DirectX is so crucial for having good performance 2D games. Still, if all you're interested in is stuff like early console games, the SDL runtime should suit you fine and also run on more people's computers. It should be done before the 1.0 release of Construct.

    Also just to note - DirectX 9 can run on pretty much any computer. You just need to run the DirectX 9 installer, and Construct games will most likely work.

  • http://downloads.sourceforge.net/constr ... irror=kent

    This SDK provides runtime and edittime interfaces compatible with the Construct 0.92 release.

    I have also successfully imported and compiled this SDK under VS2008 so let me know if you have any problems with that.

    There's also a new ETAddDependencies function in Edittime.cpp so your plugin can take advantage of 0.92's dependency packing feature - see the comments by the function for more info.

  • Don't know what happened to the forums, but I think we managed to correct it with some database tweaking... let me know if you get any forum errors.

  • Try using the Edit box object, it can save and load files.

  • OK, well 0.92 is out and you can try playing with the motion blur yourself. Motion blur is achieved through an algorithm called temporal antialiasing: this means the framerate is, say, increased by 10x (so it might be running at 750fps). Then every time it draws the screen, it has 10 frames which it blends together equally to make an image that appears blurred according to how fast objects are moving.

    To make this work with the mouse, it linearly interpolates the mouse position over these sub-frames because the mouse doesn't update that quickly. This explains why you get straight lines, and it also explains why if you move the mouse or an object extremely quickly, you see it stepping along. This still looks smoother than without motion blur, in my opinion, because you get a sense of the motion as opposed to the object displaying in a sequence of positions. Temporal anti-aliasing isn't perfect - if you don't like what it does you can just turn it off - but I think it really improves the motion and perceived smoothness of most games.

  • Download now

    Lots of important fixes including the dreaded expanding .cap files bug! Also try out motion blur - you can enable it under Application Properties / Effects. Note this works by cranking up the framerate (more info) by the selected multiple, so you'll need to make sure your game is coded to use TimeDelta where necessary. Motion blur does not require pixel shaders, but requires a feature that only some graphics cards have; see the info link for supported hardware. It'd be helpful if you let me know if it works for you, and your graphics card model.

    Here's the full changelog:

    • [ADD] DLL bundling system whereby plugin dependencies are automatically embedded (so any DLLs required by plugins can be saved inside the EXE automatically)
    • [ADD] New 'copy as text' to event sheet editor
    • [ADD] Scripting toolbar to load/save scripts and some other operations (to be expanded soon)
    • [ADD] System Object actions to python intellisense
    • [ADD] New Ribbon items to insert groups/conditions/subevents for Event Sheet Editor
    • [ADD] Ability to toggle events via Ribbon; disabled events will appear with strikethrough text and will not run
    • [FIX] Object Information dialog now displays ACEs correctly
    • [FIX] Used Plugins dialog now works correctly
    • [FIX] Ribbon tabs contextually opened now (changing to Event Sheet Editor opens that tab, etc)
    • [FIX] Cannot give a family name as an object name.
    • [FIX] Possible problem adding global variables
    • [FIX] Sprites set to 'No rotation' don't change angle even when other animation angles are drawn
    • [FIX] Actions sometimes disappearing when they reference global variables
    • [FIX] Improvements to Python redistribution (sockets should work now)
    • [FIX] Adding an action now creates an undo item
    • [FIX] No more crashes when resources not found
    • [FIX] Crash playing MIDI files in Directsound (this operation is not supported)
    • [FIX] 'Self' expressions (including .X etc) now work in movement parameters
    • [FIX] Dropping a window after dragging it made movements and timedelta values jump
    • [FIX] Every events not triggering after restarting a layout
    • [FIX] Increasing file size bug of .cap files
    • [FIX] Objects sometimes scaling wrong with Play Animation/Set Animation Frame actions
    • [CHANGE] A warning in the add family dialog to avoid object names
    • [CHANGE] Comprehensive error checking when loading .caps, alot more errors handled and no crashes if some problems encountered
    • [CHANGE] Revamped changes system. Now layouts and event sheets will show as changed in the MDI tabs and prompts to save will be far more accurate.
    • [CHANGE] Reworked Insert Object/Add Effect/Add Movement dialogs to make them more compact and neat.

  • Download now

    Lots of important fixes including the dreaded expanding .cap files bug! Also try out motion blur - you can enable it under Application Properties / Effects. Note this works by cranking up the framerate (more info) by the selected multiple, so you'll need to make sure your game is coded to use TimeDelta where necessary. Motion blur does not require pixel shaders, but requires a feature that only some graphics cards have; see the info link for supported hardware. It'd be helpful if you let me know if it works for you, and your graphics card model.

    Here's the full changelog:

    • [ADD] DLL bundling system whereby plugin dependencies are automatically embedded (so any DLLs required by plugins can be saved inside the EXE automatically)
    • [ADD] New 'copy as text' to event sheet editor
    • [ADD] Scripting toolbar to load/save scripts and some other operations (to be expanded soon)
    • [ADD] System Object actions to python intellisense
    • [ADD] New Ribbon items to insert groups/conditions/subevents for Event Sheet Editor
    • [ADD] Ability to toggle events via Ribbon; disabled events will appear with strikethrough text and will not run
    • [FIX] Object Information dialog now displays ACEs correctly
    • [FIX] Used Plugins dialog now works correctly
    • [FIX] Ribbon tabs contextually opened now (changing to Event Sheet Editor opens that tab, etc)
    • [FIX] Cannot give a family name as an object name.
    • [FIX] Possible problem adding global variables
    • [FIX] Sprites set to 'No rotation' don't change angle even when other animation angles are drawn
    • [FIX] Actions sometimes disappearing when they reference global variables
    • [FIX] Improvements to Python redistribution (sockets should work now)
    • [FIX] Adding an action now creates an undo item
    • [FIX] No more crashes when resources not found
    • [FIX] Crash playing MIDI files in Directsound (this operation is not supported)
    • [FIX] 'Self' expressions (including .X etc) now work in movement parameters
    • [FIX] Dropping a window after dragging it made movements and timedelta values jump
    • [FIX] Every events not triggering after restarting a layout
    • [FIX] Increasing file size bug of .cap files
    • [FIX] Objects sometimes scaling wrong with Play Animation/Set Animation Frame actions
    • [CHANGE] A warning in the add family dialog to avoid object names
    • [CHANGE] Comprehensive error checking when loading .caps, alot more errors handled and no crashes if some problems encountered
    • [CHANGE] Revamped changes system. Now layouts and event sheets will show as changed in the MDI tabs and prompts to save will be far more accurate.
    • [CHANGE] Reworked Insert Object/Add Effect/Add Movement dialogs to make them more compact and neat.

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  • Just to echo what was said in another thread - this bug should be fixed in 0.92, and apparently if you remove families from your application, the bloating will not occur.