christina's Forum Posts

  • Ashley newt thanks for the replies <3

    Ashley you're absolutely right, I was wrong to not have accounted for precise pixel per frame speeds. And thank you for the thorough reply.

    Platform.maxSpeed= 60 pixels per second is the ideal speed, as we've all figured out.

    The background layer, at 50,50 parallax also scrolls smoothly, presumably moving at 30pixels per second or 1 pixel every 2 frames. (EDIT: I screen captured it and both player and background layer are jaggy, but not very noticeable)

    _________

    Can we account for the fact, though, that Platform.maxSpeed = 30 has the jaggiest scrolling on the parallax layer?

    The player would theoretically move at 1 pixel every two frames (30 p/s divided by 60Hz = 0.5), which sounds fine. Regular intervals are fine for the human eye as you said, and I can confirm as an animator.

    In practice, however, player moves at 1 pixel every frame, except for rare frames when it moves 0 pixels. I don't know why.

    The parallax layer would theoretically scroll at 15frames per second, which would produce a regular pacing of 1pixel every 4 frames, which would also be fine. However practically, it staggers even more: 1px,0, 1px, 0, 0,1px, 0,0, 1px, 1px, etc

    I think this is what has confused me most. I can't account for that error in rounding.

    You can try it in this stripped down minimal .capx (scrollx = player.X for simplicity, I do not introduce my own rounding anywhere)

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28087823/Construct%20Examples/DAIKO_TWINS_JERKING_MOVEMENT/jerking30.capx

    (I tested by screen capturing a gif of the game window)

    Is there a way for the engine to evenly distribute those increments in time? Has anyone else ever checked that 60px/sec movement, with pixel rounding on, does indeed move the player 1 px per frame? Because my tests say it isn't so.

  • Thank you newt, thank you R0J0hound

    You would probably have to make your own movement system rather than use the platform behavior.

    You're right. doesn't that defeat the purpose of a game making tool though? Last time I made my own movement system, Ashley discouraged it, and for good reason. It couldn't handle slopes either. But even so, what kind of a custom movement were you thinking? Set X to self.X+60*dt ? Isn't that what platform movement does, when I've maxed acceleration and deceleration?

    Hmm...

    One thing you could try is to use the "set minimum framerate" action to set it to 60. That way dt will stay at 1/60 instead of going to 1/30 at times.

    Another idea to get things smoother is to only use speeds that are evenly divide into 60. 36 doesn't but speeds like:

    1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30,60 will give a more even motion.

    3

    I set the minimum framerate to 60 (even though I don't like the implication that it might run worse on some systems). And I set the player maxspeed to 30.

    Still some jerking. And parallax is even worse: by setting the background parallax layer to 50,50 , it would theoretically move at 15pixels/sec which is a number that evenly divides into 60.

    But in practice, it creates a ton of jerkiness!

    When I set player.maxspeed = 60, I do get a smooth result.

  • OK, when it's drawn. So how can I make the game draw 1 pixel movement per frame? Instead of irregular increments of pixels?

  • andreyin newt the tearing did indeed go away! Victory!

    Defining frame now: Frame as in, animation. As in, if you record the screen, as in andreyin's capture for example, each *frame* is not a construct 2 tick, it's a construct 2 frame. Like fps. I don't know how else to explain it.

    And right now, even though tearing is fixed, jerky movement is NOT fixed. Have a look:

    What i want is that every frame, the screen scrolls by 1px. What's happening instead is (due to the rounding probably? or something else?) the background moves a different number of pixels each time. 1, 2, 3, even none.

    This is very noticeable in fullscreen.

    Is there a way to fix it? Is it just a matter of finding the correct player.Platform.MaxSpeed ? Is it something else? Ashley?

  • I tried round(lerp()) and ceil, and floor :/ nothing. I want the player to consistently move 2 pixels per frame. Not per second, not per tick. Is that doable?

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  • I guess what I really want to know is: how can I move the player 2 pixels per frame and the background 1 pixel per frame. Consistently. At any size, even fullscreen (where 1 game pixel is obviously going to be huge)

    Even when I scale up the 128px layout to full screen, 1 pixel per frame would still read smooth.

    And then I can speed up. R0J0hound ? Magistross ?

  • but your camera completely jerks. Like, I stop in place and the camera slowly shifts into place, and then, half a second after it's stopped, it clicks one more pixel! It's very distracting. Apparently you have pixel rounding on as well. It doesn't scroll to subpixels.

    And anyway even if yours did (it doesn't), I don't want mine to.

  • in full screen? it's very jerky, yes. Performance is smooth, but lerp scrolling is jaggy.

  • thanks — Tried it, it's even jerkier then! Try it?

  • 60 is too fast. Are we sure it can't work with smaller max speeds? If so, I should have thought twice about the tiny size

  • You're right. That might have to do with player.platform.maxSpeed

    Maybe she needs to move exactly a specific number of pixels for it to work. Hm

  • um putting it out there: I would never have thought of it, but someone on twitter told me to turn windows aero back on. Apparently windows disables vsync when aero is disabled? I'm so weirded out. Thanks for listening

  • Here's the capx: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/280 ... test5.capx

    Here's the exported game:

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/280 ... index.html

    OK I know it's the usual problem:

    * pixelart game,

    * ultra small resolution 128x96

    * pixel rounding on (because I don't like sub-pixels showing whenever enemies are trying to find their footing on platforms).

    I've set fullscreen to letterbox integer, so you can see for yourselves. Just run the game and resize the window.

    When the game window is 640x480 or less, beautiful, smooth movement. Yes, it's 1 pixel at a time, but that's what's intended.

    When you resize the game window to be more than 640x480, or even worse Fullscreen, there's a ton of jerking which doesn't feel like 1 pixel at a time. It feels like the screen is tearing as well. In any case, it's suddenly not at all smooth, and it happens just a few pixels above 640x480.

    Can anyone help, this issue makes me want to seriously quit trying pixelart games on C2.

    Is it a timedelta thing? Is it a mistake on my part? I'm just using the standard platform movement.

    Is it a monitor thing? I'm noticing my second (older, crappier) monitor is almost unaffected, on chrome! Both my monitors are affected on nw.js.

    However both my monitors can play, for example, a mame-emulated version of Rainbow Islands with perfect full-scale frame rate and no jerking.

    Ashley I wish there was a way for Construct 2 to work in a mode that emulates an older processor chip, with a specific frame rate, and adjusts everything so that it looks good on modern monitors.

    thanks to anyone who takes the time, it means a lot to me.

    • Post link icon

    It is a nw.js bug, it was introduced in 0.13 beta 2 (grrrr) and fixed recently (don't run beta 2).

    It makes the game run off-screen, in distant coordinates.

    The fix is to delete your exported folder.

    https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/4265

  • R0J0hound avoiding canvas resize didn't help unfortunately. Or it wasn't noticeable anyway, and the cost was that the code became a lot less readable with all the coordinate transformations.

    But I did realize, I don't need continuous canvas redraws when I'm zooming! So I'm now only requesting a resize+redraw when layout scale is 1, 0.75 and 0.5. As you can imagine performance is stellar.

    Thanks for everything <3