danialgoodwin's Forum Posts

  • danialgoodwin I was under the impression the collision cells were a performance enhancing feature, so minimal is too much...

    I should clarify myself. From the way I understand collision cells, it takes a little bit of overhead to have, but theoretically (and most of the time) you won't notice the very slight drawback because the benefits are much greater.

    Each of those questions I asked provided a use case where there could potentially be more work required for using collision cells rather than using only brute force.

    Maybe you could share your simplified load-testing CAPX? I wouldn't mind running it to test my computer.

  • Congrats! It's like learning all over again. The ability to use Families has been the greatest benefit for me.

    https://www.scirra.com/manual/142/families

  • Would you be able to host the game on Dropbox?

    That way, we would all be able to play it online without having to download the zip, extract it, open it, play it...

    Guide: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/42/upload-your-game-to-dropbox

  • Lol, I just tried it. Great game, the first of its story-line that I've seen.

  • Ever see a cat chase the dot coming from a laser pointer?

    Maybe your cat has become too lazy to run around chasing it anymore. Solution: Run "Laser Pointer" app on your device to simulate the laser pointer. Now, your cat can sit lazily and just swat at the screen!

    lol

    As I learn C2, games will start off simple. Not much can be made more simple than a single spawn randomly darting around the page.

    You can try it for free:

    Windows 8: apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/laser-pointer-for-cats/b45f6681-cbfd-45a9-a472-2f5eeb2a734a[/li]

    • Danial -

  • I haven't done any load testing yet, but that's pretty weird. The collision cells should have a very minimal performance loss. These question may help narrow the problem.

    • In your build, are you having all your objects randomly placed in the window? (as opposed to clumped up in one small area)
    • How large are your objects?
    • By "brute force optimized" build, do you just mean that all the objects have rectangular/square collision bounding boxes? Or is there more?

  • deviever, thank you for posting your timescale solution. It makes sense that that would work. I'm now thinking of throwing that into my current game as well.

  • Yeah, I've experienced those problems too.

    And, I just want to make sure everybody else that may read this knows that there are always tradeoffs in deciding what to work on. If the Scirra duo works on website, then less time will be put into C2 updates, and vice versa.

    We (the community) aren't in charge of the updates, but if there was a poll, then I think many people would like to prioritize a few website features over C2 features. Also, that poll would be very biased in favor of the frequent forum users, who feels the affects more than the majority of C2 users who don't use the forums.

  • Fun game. Here's a few things to consider.

    • Most of C2 games runs on the GPU. Those screen recording tools likely run on the GPU also. So, they would affect each other.
    • Have you properly set the collision polygon? (When you double-click on a sprite, the bottom-left tool/icon allows you to do this.)
    • As you may know already, animations (like throwing knives) are not perfectly smooth. They are typically around 30 or 60 frames/images per second. For each frame, the location of the knife is calculated and sometimes it skips quite a few pixels. The moving sprite will skip more pixels the faster it is moving, and the slower the frames per second (fps) is. Sometimes, so many pixels are skipped that the knife sprite will go all the way through the wall.

    Having said all that, I think it's a good game. I wouldn't have called that a bug where the knives going inside the blocks. But, I didn't try it on a "slow" machine either.

  • Since nobody has directly linked to it yet, here's the official search (read: public records) for United States registered trademarks.

    http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ (then click "Basic Word Mark Search")

    It's known as TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System). And before starting a company, website, or even pseudo-company, in the US, I'd suggest doing a quick search to see if the name is taken or not. It will just prevent possible future complications.

  • Try Construct 3

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  • I'm glad I saw this thread. I was just about to post, suggesting the ability to change timezones. Though, yeah, the bug you mentioned Joannak is bigger than mine.

    I'm just glad to hear that Ashley and Tom at least know about it. I understand what it's like to work with large code bases.

    Though... if there was a thread about known issues, then that would be great too.

  • jayderyu, definitely a creative idea. My first idea/response for this was that a great community-effort plugin could be created and everybody here just adding their own devices. But, I'm sure this information is already out there somewhere, we just have to find it and make an API call to it.

    RamPackWobble, good idea, I was thinking of something like that also. Maybe we would ask users to choose a circle the think closest to one inch (or roughly 2.54cm). Or, expanding on that, it might be good enough to just label the range of circles from easy to hard, if a game could be formed like that.

    JohnnySheffield, it looks like a great website. It probably works most of the time, but didn't for me. I have a dual-monitor setup (16 inch laptop, 24 inch monitor) and the results got the pixel count right for each screen, but said both were only 13.3 inches.

    Even after seeing these great ideas, I still feel that there are more possibilities out there. I just haven't thought about them yet. I'm interested in all possibilities, no matter how easy/difficult they may be to implement.

  • In C2, how would you keep sprites the same physical size across different sized devices?

    Example: I have a game that I want to run on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. They obviously have different screen sizes, but I would still like a certain sprite to appear about one centimeter in diameter on both devices.

    I've looked in the FAQs, manual, and search, but haven't found a suitable method yet, besides manually scaling the sprites depending on the platform. I was hoping for a much more accurate method, like getting the physical screen size of the "browser"/device. Or, possibly even getting a pixel density. The Browser object/plugin has a `DevicePixelRatio` (the display pixels per CSS pixel), but that wouldn't seem to work because a phone device can have the exact same number of CSS pixels as a laptop.

    Anybody know any workarounds for maintaining the same final-sized sprite better than adjusting size of sprite depending on platform?

    One more note, I'm using the "Scale Outer" scaling mode. Not sure if that is helpful or not.

  • RamPackWobble, wow, these are great examples! I wasn't even aware that C2 could do this.

    Thank you very much for sharing tutorials and example code also!

  • Link to .capx file (required!):

    [Not needed nor helpful, but I do have helpful screenshots below]

    Steps to reproduce:

    1. Open C2/WP8 file located at C2\exporters\html5\wp8\MainPage.xml

    2. In the top-level tag, the following code is always set to true, rather than being a variable so that it can change between true and false.

    Observed result:

    <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"</font>

    This causes an extra side in apps to always have a "black bar" where the system tray would be.

    (Using a letterbox scale)<img src="http://simplyadvanced.net/dev/construct2/bug/SystemTray-IsVisible-True.png" border="0" />

    Expected result:

    I would expect the gameplay area to use up more of the screen when I choose a fullscreen scaling option. So, when I change WP8 code to

    <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="False"</font> ...

    (Using a letterbox scale)

    <img src="http://simplyadvanced.net/dev/construct2/bug/SystemTray-IsVisible-False.png" border="0" />

    Browsers affected:

    Chrome: n/a

    Firefox: n/a

    Internet Explorer: n/a

    Operating system & service pack:

    Windows 8.1 Enterprise, 64-bit

    Construct 2 version:

    Tested in r154, r155, 156

    • Danial Goodwin -

    ps - I'm not sure if it is in the WP8 guidelines, that the status bar always has to be visible. But, my past three WP8 apps have been certified/published on the first try with `shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="False"`. Also, this basically just the first method that I found that works for getting to fullscreen. There may or may not be more solutions.