cjbruce's Forum Posts

  • DaniellMesquito

    Done! I just modified everything so that it is a complete working example of a platform shooting game. I included a multi-purpose controller that you can use for lots of different kinds of games. There are no HTML form elements -- everything is built entirely using Construct 2 sprite objects, text objects, and events.

    To play the game on AirConsole:

    https://www.airconsole.com/#http://nerdislandstudios.com/acexample/

    Direct link to the screen file (this works with keyboard controls):

    http://nerdislandstudios.com/acexample/screen/index.html

    Direct link to the controller file (you can try this by itself on your phone):

    http://nerdislandstudios.com/acexample/ ... index.html

    The screen's .capx can be downloaded here:

    http://nerdislandstudios.com/acexample/platformshooterairconsoleexample.capx

    The controller's .capx can be downloaded here:

    http://nerdislandstudios.com/acexample/multipleairconsolecontrollerexample.capx

    Notes on the controller .capx:

    -I designed the controller as a general-purpose controller. There are way more events and game layouts than you will actually use.

    -By pressing the "?" button, you can switch to different controller layouts and control schemes.

    -All directional messages sent from the controller begin with either "r", "c", "8", or "t". These characters indicate how the game should respond, and were intended to test different driving control schemes for a top-down driving game. They were extremely useful to quickly switch between different control schemes in the middle of the game, but you will most likely want to get rid of these extra events once you settle on a control scheme.

    Notes on the screen .capx:

    -This was a prototype for a platform shooter. Feel free to modify and use however you want.

    -I have extra events in here that strip out the "r", "c", "8", or "t" from the controller messages. For this game, they are not necessary, and I recommend eliminating everything that is unnecessary in your actual game.

    Notes on directory structure:

    -You will want to create the following directory structure for your project:

    -Always export your screen .capx to the screen/ folder.

    -Always export your controller .capx to the controller/ folder.

    -Create screen.html and controller.html files, as I described in this thread:

    https://www.scirra.com/forum/airconsole-controller-maker_t186227?start=130

  • Can you please share the updated .capx files?

    Also:

    [quote:cikjvbh2]I also recommend changing the "Use HTML elements" property to "False".

    Why?

    I'm cleaning up the examples and commenting everything now. I should have everything ready in a few hours.

    The reason that I would disable html elements is that they don't play together well with Construct. This is made much worse by Airconsole, as it applies a whole bunch of additional formatting rules on top of Construct's rules.

  • The sample .capx files are requesting the old plugin, instead of version 2. Someone with the old plugin, please change it to support the version 2.

    The sample .capx files are pretty basic. I have updated .capx files working with version 2 of the AirConsole plugin, if you are interested. My version has a bunch of different controller layouts with a bunch of different types of command messages.

    Also, once you set up your directory structure as described in my previous post, you will no longer need the magicwand.cmd file.

  • Bob Thulfram glerikud

    Good points. I've recently decided to give Construct another shot taking the opportunity that C3 is here (a couple of years ago I switched from native to C2 deciding it was way more effective and fun, but the mobile performance turned out to be a show stopper back then) and I'm loving it. Still have to do some testing on the performance aspect though.

    I suppose it depends on what you want to do, and what your expectations are for mobile. Right now I'm building a mobile-first 3D game in C2. I have been watching the Unreal Engine 4 GDC 2017 videos at the same time, and it is really clear to me that each engine has their own strengths and weaknesses. C2 + Q3D gets you 3D visualization technology that is effectively equivalent to what existed in PCs around 15 years ago. It isn't that HTML5 can't do better, it is just that a lot of the modern features that exist in javascript libraries like threeJS or babylonJS haven't been implemented in C2. The big advantage to this approach is the fact that I am WAY faster prototyping in C2, even without a full 3D editor.

    I expect my next non-game will be built in UE4 because I will need access to the up-to-date visualization tools for the project. For mobile, however, I still plan on using C2/C3 -- the 3D game I'm currently building runs fine on an iPhone 6, and probably won't be released for another year. I expect that the end product should run great on 3-year-old hardware, which is plenty old to cover a majority of users.

  • Hi nice people around the world

    I would like to share a sort of cell shading based on Sobel filter;

    Here 8 sample pass cell shading example:

    http://gigatron3k.free.fr/html5/C2/FX/cshading/

    If you want this shader you must send request ....

    Regards

    Gigatron and QuaziGNRLnose,

    I have had three people ask me for tutorial on how to do a toon shader in Q3D in Construct 2. I'm not familiar enough with shaders to know what it would take to implement something like this. Is this something that is possible and/or easy to do?

    Thanks for your help!

  • The second example capx is probably a better starting point to understanding how to use the behavior.

    The first example is more like a proof of concept, it's definitely not something you should do in a game you plan to release for mobile/tablet. Creating and destroying objects every tick, all the while doing strenuous pathfinding calculations, is absolutely not optimal.

    Agreed. I'm already working with Q3D for rendering and 3D physics, so both CPU and GPU optimization are super-important. I don't really care that enemies follow the shortest path, just as long as they follow *any* path that gets them where they need to go. EasyStar.js does a great job with this optimization.

    I will try to get a version working with this with 3D physics next week.

  • > Updated the plugin using the 0.4.1 version of EasyStarJS. Since I practically did this on my lunch break at work, absolutely NO testing whatsoever was done so please try it and report your success here. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    >

    > https://magistross.github.io/files/easy ... p_1_02.zip

    >

    Sweet!

    Thanks for putting this together so quickly. I will test it out as soon as I can next week. I have to get through another project tomorrow.

    Based on a minor tweak to the example .capx (I had to put the "destroy" under the "On path 'test' found", rather than every tick) and 10 minutes of testing, it appears to work great!

    Attempt at optimization for garbage collection:

    Although the example was only using about 125 objects and 6% CPU time on my Surface Pro 4, I thought I would try to optimize garbage collection by not destroying and creating new nodes every time a path was found. Instead, I created a grid of nodes on start of layout and set them all as invisible. When a path is found, I set only the path nodes to visible.

    Result:

    With this "optimization", CPU usage was insignificant, but frame rate dropped to an unplayable 25 fps, with a noticeable pause in pathfinding. I assume this frame rate drop is happening because of a GPU bottleneck, but I had no idea that it would be so dramatic.

    Conclusion:

    -Having a node object for every grid tile is more computationally expensive than just creating and destroying nodes as needed for a 28 x 16 grid.

    -Better yet, don't put any node objects on screen at all. Instead of actual objects, compute direction based on the nearest tilemap square.

    Further work:

    I need to play around with things now to figure out how to get AIs to follow the path. I will be working in 3D with physics, so path following will be a bit more complicated, but EasyStar.js seems to be rock solid. Thank you! Thank you for putting this together -- you saved me a ton of time!

  • Updated the plugin using the 0.4.1 version of EasyStarJS. Since I practically did this on my lunch break at work, absolutely NO testing whatsoever was done so please try it and report your success here. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    https://magistross.github.io/files/easy ... p_1_02.zip

    Sweet!

    Thanks for putting this together so quickly. I will test it out as soon as I can next week. I have to get through another project tomorrow.

  • Anyway, just to conclude on the rotation bits. I found that multiplying pi with any positive number will rotate the Q3DModel without any problems. It's an acceptable starting point for spinning hazardous objects that are statically placed in the world.

    So weird. Thank you for figuring this out.

    I feel like someone should be making a list of Q3D quirks and gotchas.

  • > ...I ended up using torques instead of setting angles for all physics objects.

    > I have no idea what is going on with the uneven angles though. It was just plain bizarre.

    >

    My last resort is to use torque (maybe), which, is rather overkill for a statically placed wind-turbine providing one among many other hazardous obstacles for the player vehicle (for a game I'm working on).

    And the effin' angles... yes. I'm still trying to figure that out. Even if i made a 3D floor tile in Blender3D, duplicated a few, rotated them and wrote down each tile's X, Y, Z rotation on a piece of paper, then input them into as values in Q3DModel, they don't visually appear the same either.

    I agree. I have found the Oimo physics is actually faster than most of the techniques I tried - to the point where I was satisfied with the performance.

  • > ...I ended up just ignoring it and working around it.

    >

    It's "workaround-able" for some games but can introduce far-reaching inefficiencies for others. I think the real question is, is rotating by a local axis -- which should have been a problem-free instruction -- even "advised" or not.

    By "advised" i really mean robust, or should I just treat it simply as a non-existent function and move on?. There are a few things I'm seeing but don't have an IQ of a thousand or more.

    So, if anyone can correlate why the rotations are only okay at angles 3, 6, 9, 12 etc., as can be seen here, then you're a genius (maybe). Basically values in multiples of 3 (integer) or pi.

    Another really weird thing I found is that it was computationally three times as expensive to set rotation than to apply a torque to achieve the same effect. I ended up using torques instead of setting angles for all physics objects.

    I have no idea what is going on with the uneven angles though. It is just plain bizarre.

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  • It's unfortunately out of my control. The pathfinding algorithm comes from an external library. This plugin simply expose its API so you can use it in Construct. However, the version of the library that the plugin uses is quite outdated. Maybe this particular problem was fixed in a more recent version, but I can't be sure unless I try a newer version.

    Wow! I'm really impressed by the speed of the algorithm!

    I would love to use this in my game, rather than writing my own. Any chance that it would be an easy update to get the newer version running in the plugin?

  • Eh... I'm trying to rotate a collider mesh (no model) but am getting strange results. It's just me?

    Does this (video below) happen to anyone else? Really small .capx test file included below.

    Would appreciate any explanations as to why this happens.

    I saw this problem as well when trying to apply a manual rotation to a physics object. I ended up just ignoring it and working around it.

  • Thanks for the information.

    So you do recommend registering at least an LLC just to avoid taking a big hit if someone sues? Even if I make a game that doesn't copy anything, it's probably better safe than sorry.

    If you have an income and are willing to pay the yearly filing fees, then yes. Here in Illinois, it costs me about $1000/year between LLC, attorney, accountant, Apple Developer fee, and C3 license. This does not include web hosting, artwork, equipment, advertising, software, hardware, or any other expenses. I would not be able to cover my costs on app sales alone, but with contract work I am able to pay the bills.

    If I did not do contract work, there would be a 100% chance of me losing thousands of dollars because I formed a company, versus a negligible chance that someone would come after me for copyright infringement. The bottom line is that someone would have to actually care enough to sue, and there are millions of people developing things and making almost no money on sales, just like me. If you are planning to do development to support yourself full time, then yes, form a company to protect yourself. Otherwise, you run the risk of incurring lots of yearly expenses that you won't be able to recover in sales.

  • > Hi

    >

    Hi, thanks for the great plugin first of all!

    Is there anyway to get a fake "3D-look" of walls?

    Very cool plugin!

    You could use the Q3D plugins with it to make actual 3D walls. I was toying with the idea of procedurally-generated levels, and this might be just the ticket!