deadeye's Forum Posts

  • Is there something wrong or missing with Construct's built in platform movement?

    The platform movement is miles better than MMF's default platform movement, but it still has problems.

    1. Holding Jump down makes your character bounce around like he's on a pogo stick (should be a checkable option to be able to turn it off).

    2. Holding both Left and Right at the same time makes your character walk funny (the movement favors the last control you press, so you character sometimes walks backwards). With both keys down they should cancel each other out which means the player would stop horizontal movement and stay facing the same direction he was going. This can be fixed by adding a series of events to correct it, but even so it's a flaw.

    3. Lack of customization at runtime for gravity, jump strength, jump sustain, and speed.

    If you could manually manipulate speed, you could create things like horizontal moving platforms that add their speed value to the player's speed, or conveyor belts, or enemies and npc's that use platform movement, or ladders and ropes to climb (by manipulating y speed) etc.

    If you could change jump strength and gravity you could create springboards to launch the player in the air, swimming areas, low-g sections, etc.

    To a lot of this stuff with the platform movement as it is now means having to manually update the player's x/y coordinates, which means you lose the benefit of the platform movement's collision detection. And if you have to start writing new collision routines to compensate for that you're basically making a custom platform movement anyway, so the default one loses it's usefulness for anything but the most basic stuff.

  • I did a clean install of 0.91 and the image editor went back to behaving properly, so something is definitely up with 0.92

    Edit: Oops, sorry for the double-post.

  • But I'm concerned about how games will run on slower computers that aren't up to date and probably are running on DirectX8 or even DX7 hardware or even integrated graphics.

    Now that you told me, I know that DirectX9 will run on any computer... but how well does it run? I don't to cause any unnecessary slowdown on certain computers just because of DirectX9 performance (or lack thereof).

    I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about my crappy old computer and my crappy old video card by now, but hey... it brings good news this time.

    Even though I can't run Pixel Shader effects I have yet to see anything made in Construct that runs slow on my computer (with the one exception of Ashley's blur test, and that only ran crappy at 20x blur). I've run tests with hundreds of moving sprites, very large (1280px x 1280px) rotating spites, multiple layers of parallax with alpha blending and high-res sprites at 1024x768 fullscreen resolution, and it's all run just fine. The hardware acceleration covers most of the work. As long as someone has a computer that was new 5 or 6 years ago, and has some kind of graphics card in it besides the onboard video, they should be just fine for what you want to do.

  • I don't have the color blend problem on a fresh install.

    The line and draw tool do draw 4px at 1px though. The flip buttons and rectangle selection also do not work here.

    In a way I'm glad to know it's not just me that's having the problem, but then that probably means it's not a quick fix.

  • That's awesome. It's very cinematic in a way. Like the camera's all shaky and zooming around frantically to try to keep up with the action.

    It looks pretty decent on my crappy card (the 5x blur does, anyway), but I can tell that the 100 fps it shows in the title bar is not accurate at all. Especially on 20x blur. On 20x blur it says 100-110 fps, but it's more like 4 fps.

  • The image editor in the new build has gone all wacky for me. There are a lot of problems I'm having with it:

    A 1px eraser is actually 4px wide, and some opacity is bleeding in at the edges even if I have hardness set to 100. Same for the line tool.

    Drawing with either the pencil or the brush creates some sort of additive effect, or like it's drawing over itself with opacity even if opacity is set at 255. I can't really tell what it's doing. Here's a screenshot of me trying to draw a single purple line with the pencil tool:

    <img src="http://xs125.xs.to/xs125/08105/line968.png">

    Trying to select an area with the rectangular marquee tool doesn't select the proper area, it selects pixels toward the bottom of the image instead. Trying to select with the circular marquee crashes Construct.

    The "Flip Horizontal" button seems to be broken.

    Um... I think that's it. Everything else seems to work okay. What could cause this? I don't see anything in the changelog that says you even touched the image editor. Is .92 compatible with the settings I had on my tools previously? Like, if I clear out some "tool settings .ini" or something will it fix itself?

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  • Yay, the forums are back! The outage made me feel funny because it interrupted my browsing routine. I think I might be slightly obsessive-compulsive

  • It works on my crappy GeForce4 MX 440. It's a little jaggy though. When I swirl the mouse in a circle it makes short segments of straight lines rather than a smooth curve. If I had a better card and a higher framerate I'm sure it would be a hell of a lot smoother.

  • Hey Ashley would it be possible to add some actions to the Platform movement for "Set Jump Strength," "Set Jump Sustain," and "Set Gravity?" This would make creating things like spring-boards and swimming levels much easier.

    Also, I'm seconding this request:

    Requesting set x/y speed of the platform movement.

    Though really I suppose setting the X speed is all you'd need because you can already use a "Jump" action and falling is automatic. This could make for fully automated things like title-screen demos, cut scenes, or even enemies that use platform movement.

  • That looks totally boss. It is full-screen only or will you be able to apply it to individual sprites as well?

  • That stuff looks cool deadeye. The scientist is very 'you', with the glasses.

    Heh, are you referring to my avatar? That's actually John Flansburg from They Might Be Giants. Though I do wear glasses.

    I'll probably go out and find some learning material on animation when my life settles down and I can really dig into this sort of thing again.

    Good luck with that. There are a few good resources on traditional 2d animation on the web. You might also look into some dvd tutorials (like the Gnomon dvds, but I don't think they specifically have any 2d animation stuff) because seeing something in motion and having it explained at the same time is much more effective. They can be a little spendy, but not nearly as spendy as art school.

  • I'm not an expert either, but I think he looks maybe a little too clip-arty. I think you could fit a bit more personality/charm/distinct qualities into him, maybe by making him look a little worried or giving him a more distinct posture.

    Other than that, I really like your basic concept. He's just a little too garden-variety, is all.

    I appreciate the feedback, but I really don't know what I would do do spice him up, or even why I would do it. I decided to go low res for a couple reasons:

    The first is simplicity. Not only is it easier on me as the game artist, bit it fits in with the character himself. He's just a scientist. He wears a lab coat and khakis. The main focus of the game is going to be the gameplay, so story is secondary. This leads into reason two: he's not a character-driven character, so to speak. His sole purpose is to interact with the game environment, so he doesn't really need to emote or express himself or even stand out in any way. If it were a mascot-driven game then more emphasis would be given to making the character emotive (as in my Squarebear design).

    Even so I did try tinkering around with more detail when I was designing him, like a nose, mouth and pocket protector, but it just doesn't look right without bumping the number of colors in the palette way up, which I want to avoid. In fact, in the latest incarnation I've reduced the number of colors even more by taking out the darkest pants color and the shading on the shirt. The point is to make him look as old-school as possible while still looking smooth in the animation.

    Speaking of which I did take vinny's suggestion and added a fourth frame to the running animation, and it does look smoother. I'll probably add even more by the time the game is done. I also changed up his jumping frames so he doesn't look so much like a candy-ass leaping around in a field of daisies.

    Anyway, I haven't worked on it in about a week. I'm starting to slack again. I got caught up making background and platform tiles when I should really just be finishing up the engine, and switching gears like that interrupted my workflow so it's harder to get back into it. It's a bad habit I need to break.

  • sprites with a single animation with a single frame to display, which are not moving (aka a static, unchanging sprite) are highly optimised and you should be able to create them in the high tens of thousands before the object count starts impacting performance.

    Welp, guess this answers my problem with Tiled Background stuff. I'll just switch everything over to sprites. I guess I'm still kind of stuck on the limitations of MMF and thinking that I'll have similar problems with Construct.

  • I'm going to go reconstruct at least the dragging system now.

    For those who want to know:

    Physics -> Set Velocity

    X: MouseX - Sprite.X

    Y: MouseY - Sprite.Y

    Holy... whoa.

    It's so simple, and yet so perfect. This works like a dream. You are a friggin genius.

    Good luck getting your other stuff sorted out. I hope you can salvage your work.