deadeye's Forum Posts

  • You can still play Oblivion on older hardware.

    http://www.oldblivion.com/

    Holy smokes, I'm definitely going to check that out

    GTA:SA is another one I've been playing recently that didn't run on my previous card at all. It's running okay, but I can't run it at full quality on all the settings. Still it gets a little choppy sometimes and there are more than a few surprise fences and hedges that magically materialize five seconds after I crash into them, but it's still a fun game.

  • ...from six years ago!

    As some of you may recall from my then-constant bitching, I used to have a video card made out of scrap lumber with the words "geeforse lol" scribbled on the side in crayon. It had no pixel shader support and I was a very unhappy caveman because my fellow Constructors were going hog-wild over all these fancy effects. That is, until I got myself a brand-spankin' new (well, it was still shrinkwrapped anyway) e-GeForce 6200 so I could make my happy Construct dreams come true. What a marvel of ancient technology it turned out to be! Gentlemen must have popped their monocles and spun their top-hats over the bleeding-edge visuals it provided them back when the 6200 was first released in Victorian times.

    <img src="http://i36.tinypic.com/1zpr3ur.jpg">

    Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I've been a bit behind in my gaming and I'm trying to catch up. It's still kind of frustrating to find good games that run well on my card, but one I've found rather enjoyable is Morrowind.

    Yeah, I know it's probably an old and boring game for many of you now, but hey, it's new to me. So here it is, my impromptu and unsolicited review of Elder Scrolls: Morrowind.

    It's, uh, pretty cool. I tried running it on my old card once and the framerate was so choppy that it was completely unplayable. But now I'm pleased to report that while still a little choppy (but only outdoors at full draw distance) it's very much playable, and I've been very much playing it.

    I must admit, at first I didn't see what all the fuss was about. It took like 45 minutes just to get the character creation and opening tutorials done. I wasn't much impressed. But I stuck with it, and stuck with it some more, and got my ass handed to me several times before I got the feel of the game.

    It's surprisingly deep and detailed. I can't recall ever playing a game before where you didn't walk into a house and clear every little object out. It's strange to me to have a game with so much useless stuff lying around. In every game I played before this, if you found a fork, you'd be needing that fork later for some puzzle or whatever. In Morrowind, there's a freaking fork on every table and you don't ever need a single damn one of them. It's just... bizzare.

    The apprehension I feel when playing is also new. I find I have to exercise restraint quite a lot. I'm used to feeling that in games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, where everything is claustrophobic and you don't know what's around the next corner or what's behind the door. But this game makes me nervous about going outside in the open, which is weird. It's safe indoors... but stray too far from town and you're ambushed by weird creepy things.

    At any rate, I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and if you've never played, I suggest you do. And if you have played, suggest some fun stuff to check out or do (I taunted Stargel in Balmora into attacking me just because I liked the way he dressed. Nobody was selling black pants or a pimped-out shirt like his so how else was I gonna get those clothes other than off of his corpse? ).

    Also, feel free to suggest any favorite games you may have from a few years back that my fancy new card might be able to handle. And I'll report back in another few years when I've finally had a chance to play Oblivion.

  • MMF2 has a special designed "flame object" ( http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=6857 ) to make realistic fire. Its very handy since fire is an often needed effect and its very hard to make in other ways. Its very diferent from the particle object. Sadly it brought the framerate down so bad that it was very hard to use in games.

    I was under the impression that the Flame object was just a custom-made particle object that is limited to just a few specific tasks. With the right tweaking you should be able to get similar effects from Construct's particle object.

    Speaking of hot spots, I'd deeply love to give the coordinates numerically, as well as having a way to 'flip' them. It's always a pain when converting animations from right to left that don't have a center hotspot.

    I always just make my sprites with one red pixel on them so I don't have to fudge around with where to put my hotspots on import. It makes the whole sprite importing thing way easier, like an assembly line.

    Having a couple "flip hotspots" and "flip image points" checkboxes next to the flip buttons would be handy though.

  • Also, upon reading someone else's thread about physics collisions, i would like to also suggest, alongside with the collision toggle on and off, it would also be nice to be able to choose WHICH physics objects affect a certain physics objects collisions, for example a family of walls causes collisions whereas a family of say the player's limbs (if you're doing a ragdoll thingy) don't collide with each other.

    Now that would be lovely

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  • you can still trick it though, by going back a little after every bullet is shot.

    I thought that was kinda the point... that it's a system by which you have to be tricky to avoid getting hit.

  • I think I might make this a built-in expression or something, because it's very useful for gameplay and the formula is pretty complex.

    Damn, I hope so I'm completely lost on the math.

    Works pretty flawlessly though. I'd say a mix of all three styles would probably be good for waves of grunts or enemy ships or whatever, but if they all had perfect aim that would make for a very frustrating game. Better for bosses and mini-bosses, or smaller groups of enemies.

  • > in my rebuttal i would like to point out that even after penile shrinkage, measuring with the metric measurement system will yield a greater, more impressive number compared to the imperial measurement system

    >

    Hmmm. Maybe you have a point. 19 centimeters does sound more impressive...

    (that wasn't over the line, was it? )

    Oh brother

  • You're making an isometric game using the physics?

    I... I can't even imagine how that would work.

  • It looks more smokey than watery to me. It doesn't billow like smoke, but then again it doesn't wave or ripple like water either.

    It's still a really cool looking effect regardless.

  • since we sweeds aren't spoiled with 30 degrees all the year around its hard to stay away from the beach!

    At first I thought "spoiled? What the..." Then I remembered you must be using celsius, or centigrade, or whatever. Metric, I dunno. At any rate, 30 degrees here in America is below freezing

  • Agreed. In any physics puzzle game there has to be a certain degree of "forgiveness" designed into the puzzle to allow for randomness. There might be a "perfect" or "optimal" way to complete the puzzle, but there should be some small amount of leeway on either side of that line. Just try to incorporate that into the design and you'll be fine.

    It's like when Jeff Goldblum is flirting with that chick in Jurassic Park... dripping water down her hand, and explaining that it will never follow the exact same path. Chaos Theory, man.

  • What was the reply?

    I wish you luck in your project, but I'm afraid I'm not looking to get into a collaboration right now. Not to mention I haven't used Construct in a couple months and I'm rather behind on new features and bugfixes and such.

  • Hmm... well, mine says "1 new message" right now, so I don't know what's up there. I'll check it and see.

    Edit:

    Welp, it was the reply from you, Ash. "Yep, it worked!" And now it says "0 new messages" again.

    Is it a problem maybe with the board themes not displaying the number of PM's correctly? I'm using Czar Green and it seems to work for me. I dunno... just a guess.

  • The reason I say it's inefficient to pass all the level data though an array every cycle is because once the level is loaded you don't really need the array to keep track of walls and floors and such any more. The array is like a blueprint... but once the building is built you don't need to reference the blueprint to walk around in it... you have real-world walls and floors to see and navigate through.

    Imagine the building is your house, and you need to go to the bathroom. Instead of looking down the hall and moving toward the bathroom door, you're looking at the blueprint of your house. Every step you take, you have the contractors tear down your house and build a whole new house around you. As fast as those contractors might be, they really don't need to be doing that, and you don't really need to be looking at your blueprint.

    So toss the blueprint and just walk to the bathroom on your own.

    As for enemies keeping track of the player position and obstacles, you can give each of them a "mini-array." Let's assume, in a grid-based system where each enemy can move one space, that there are nine choices an enemy can make when moving: One of eight spaces surrounding it, or the space it's currently standing on (i.e., do not move). You only need a 3x3 array to cover all movement options. So you run your algorithm to pick the space to move to, and then go on to the next part of the selection, which is checking for obstacles...

    Your enemy has a target space that it wants to move to, so it runs a quick check to see if there is a real-world, physical wall in the way. If there is, do not move (or move to the second best space, etc.). If there isn't, then move to the target space.

    Using a mini array like this is much more efficient that keeping track of the entire playing field, and what's better is it's recyclable. You can clear the array and reuse it for each enemy during the enemy AI routine. Once they have their final target coordinates stored in a pvt variable or whatever, they don't need to reference the array any more. The engine moves on to the movement routine, checks the coord stored for them, and just places them there.

    I know it's not the example you were looking for, and it might not be exactly suited to your purposes, but maybe it'll give you some ideas on how you can craft your own AI/movement. Hope this helps.

    Edit:

    Er, yeah. What Ashley said.

  • I replied to a PM from SuperV a few days ago and learned today that he never received it. I tried sending it two more times and it doesn't show up in the "Sent Items" box, it just sits in my Outbox.

    Ashley, I also tried sending a PM to you about the problem but, ironically enough, I don't think it went through...