birbilis's Forum Posts

  • after a quick reading:

    1) you don't need to push all state to clients, only the part of it they're viewing on a big map and possibly for the neighbouring parts of the map (and/or using prediction of where the player is heading to)

    2) you can use dead-reckoning to estimate motion of items controlled by other players when you have no data (yet) coming about their actions (e.g. if you have adaptive quantity of data that you pass to the client based on the bandwidth of their connection to your server)

  • Speaking of the image editor, another usability issue I just noticed is that when I double-click at the Object pane on a tiled background object that I'm looking at in the currently visible layout in Construct 2, I get the image editor where I can edit the tile, but I have to close the editor to see my changes in the layout.

    If it had some Apply button apart from the [X] to close it, then I would be able to edit the tile and press apply to see it at the layout I had already open.

    Being able to also set that you want continuous "apply" would be nice, since you'd see the tileset change in the layout while you work in the image editor. Or else it should detect that the image is from a Tileset and show me somewhere a preview of how it will look while I'm working on it (just looking at one tile isn't helpful). To do that it could draw some extra tiles around the tile I'm editing, faded out a bit to make apparent the area I'm editing. In fact it could draw faded tiles around the edited tile and another set of even more faded tiles around those (2 "rings" of extra tiles that is)

  • Aphrodite indeed, that's what I'm suggesting (apart from adding an ellipse tool that should be easy to implement), to add an "Open in external editor" button to the Image Editor to open the currently selected frame in another program (passed as a parameter to a command you define in construct's settings, say "c:\program files\paintnet\paintnet.exe %file" or something like that). Probably this model could be used at other places in Construct 2, to open audio in Audacity etc.

  • is this plugin needed anymore, or does Construct 2 have integrated support for Spriter now?

  • codah regarding a more general "run external tool" this is a separate thing, would be nice to be able to launch such taking as params asset filenames, but don't remember if there is a pane with the "file" assets in Construct 2 to be able to select an item from there and right-click to launch a specific external tool from a context menu

    the only place I see assets is the image editor that's why I'd expect a button there to launch an external image editor with the asset's image file passed as parameter and monitor for file changes so that it updates in construct 2 upon save in the external editor. Maybe there are other places one can do similar for external asset editors (like for audio assets - to be able to launch say Audacity or other audio editor), but haven't used Construct 2 enough to suggest something for that

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  • ...and it's not just for kids, it's for prototyping too, I want to quickly do some prototype (that's why I find the existence of only a rectangle tool and no ellipse too limiting) without having to use file dialogs (too many steps/distractions)

  • I find it a bit annoying now that for creating a new sprite

    1) I double click on the layout

    2) I select Sprite

    3) I click with the crosshair somewhere on the layout (again? couldn't it have used the position from step 1?)

    4) The image editor shows but isn't of much use and I have to load an image file from it (but I want to draw a new sprite)

    At step [4] it would be nice if I could press a button to open an external editor with a temporary .png file created by construct 2 and passed to it as a command-line parameter, so that then I would just need to press save at the external editor (using shell notifications construct 2 would update the image in its image editor upon save). I wouldn't need to close the external painting program if I wished so, but I could even close it since I know I can quickly go to it

    I don't expect kids to use ALT+TAB and mess around with multiple applications, neither to go find a painter program and launch it, save somewhere, then find the file from inside construct 2 every time they just want to quickly make a new sprite to try some game idea they have

  • if I could link array cells to properties of sprites (like databinding), then it would be the same, but I don't think I can. I don't want to use code to relocate the objects, neither I want to use code to shuffle the array (does it have such method on its own btw?)

    also, I just checked and indeed if I add two sprites and edit the first one's container property to add the 2nd one, then the property inspector shows the container property of the 2nd sprite also to contain the 1st one (they share the same container instance).

    But this is fine, it just means that I would like to have Behaviors attached ONTO CONTAINERS. That could be used for other scenario too, not just for shuffling the locations of visual objects they contain

  • I already wrote above, that I consider Construct 2 an integrated environment and also one that could be used by kids to learn programming (via game creation). Having to learn yet another program to paint and to switch between the two apps via the OS facilities (e.g. ALT+TAB) is extra burden. That's why I suggested at least having a button to open the file in an external tool you define (like Paint.net or Gimp [or Photoshop etc.] for example) and to use shell notifications to monitor the file for changes.

  • regarding Containers, the doc I see here: scirra.com/manual/150/containers seems to say that each object has a Container property, to which I can link more objects.

    So I could have a background object that in its Container holds multiple cards

    I want to have a Behavior that shuffles the locations of the linked items (not of the parent item that has the Container property), with a property to do it in a time interval and also be able to invoke the behavior on-demand.

    Of course, if there is no API currently to enumerate items in a container, it would be nice to have that, since one could use Containers for more stuff then (like for making logical graphs). In fact containers could have an option on whether they treat all objects as one (as they do now), or if they're just a logical grouping (used in EventSheets by enumerating linked objects or used by behaviors)

    a related question btw is, can I make a Behavior using eventsheets or do I have to use the Javascript API?

    btw, what I found on the forums was code to shuffle arrays, don't want to do that, want to have the simplest way to shuffle objects around in the layout (this is more of a design goal, to make a reusable thing for such games, I know myself how to shuffle stuff in code)

  • I see Construct 2 as a good tool for teaching kids (moving between apps can confuse them), so I'd love to see some functionality similar to the image editor in Scratch at least (http://scratch.mit.edu)

    update: oops, hadn't checked Scratch for a while (remembered the desktop 1.3 version), its new image editor has vector and bitmap mode etc.

  • Another thing one should look for inspiration on designing behaviors is NetLogo. Has many amazing models in there

  • btw, here (http://www.mech.upatras.gr/~robgroup/ol ... index.html) you can find a demo with source code (it was in Delphi [the algorithms are in the respective folder]) for various path planning algorithms you can use on a grid

    don't remember if I had also implemented A* in that demo, probably not (I see it has BestFirst, BreadthFirst and DepthFirst)

    UPDATE: it doesn't allow me to post URLs here, so replace the last part with

    ~robgroup/old_site/search/index.html

  • If there was a way to visually link items and make directional graphs (with an arrow pointing towards the direction and two arrow heads for both directions [to avoid making two links in that case]), and you could query the node connectivity, one could more easily do path planning on the graph

  • It would be nice if there was a Shuffle behavior, where I could make a container (held by some background component or something), assign various sprites to it and then tell the container (or the parent object that has the container [if I understand how containers work]) to shuffle the positions of the items held (it would be a Shuffle behavior on the parent I think if it only holds one container [is it a property?] at a time)

    I'd like to be able to set a time interval for the auto-shuffle (and be able to set that to 0 to stop shuffling) and also to be able to manually tell it to shuffle the item locations

    this is very handy for memory games (e.g. where you have a grid of turned-over cards and you want to find pairs - they need to be shuffled at the beginning and possibly also periodically for making it harder)

    not sure if there is such behavior already and I guess I need to learn the Javascript API (or can I make behaviors using eventsheets?) to implement it myself (is there any example of how to make a new behavior)?