Excal's Forum Posts

  • The path between the nodes? When I run the .capx, I see multiple possible paths, which would create problems as the path taken would determine how long the path actually is.

    One thing you can try is to create an invisible sprite that pathfinds from node to node and track its travel distance in some sort of variable.

  • I'm a huge fan of scaling down instead of scaling up.

  • It looks like you could accomplish this by having a giant level and a ScrollTo behavior attached to the main character.

  • Definitely is possible - I'm working on one right now. Keep in mind that most of the 'is it possible in Construct' questions are less 'is it possible' and more 'are you capable of doing it'.

    Not sure what you mean by goodly amount of text.

  • <img src="http://i.imgur.com/cFNHm2I.png" border="0">

    Basically the first set of terrain generated seems to have multiple generations of terrain overlapping, while the second set of terrain generated seems 'fine' but has gaps in it.

    <img src="http://i.imgur.com/hJcx1Pm.png" border="0">

    Can someone take a look and help pinpoint where the trouble spots are?

    TankRunner.capx

  • Gave this a whirl. Definitely gets challenging later on, but the difficulty ramp doesn't feel off at all.

    Great graphics and sound effects.

  • Export to HTML5 and you can open the Javascript code.

  • Ah, so instead of using accelerations and decelerations, use orbits?

    This could work. I could have an invisible object in the center for the player ship to 'orbit' around to keep it from going off-screen too much.

    This sounds pretty good in theory. I'll keep you guys updated as I test this out.

  • I guess I'll explain a bit more in detail what the 'fluidity' I'm seeing is, and why I'm not sure how to implement it.

    Right now the player ship and enemy ships are powered by accelerations. When the player ship gets within some distance of an enemy ship, it reverses acceleration to give the impression of strafing. However, this looks very 'controlled' and after some time, it just looks like the ship is just being repetitive.

    The SPAZ main menu features ships that rapidly accelerate and decelerate to the point where it looks like some of them are stopping and then changing direction, in addition to the 'strafing' I have already implemented. This creates a dynamic feel to the main menu where the ships seem to move in very dynamic and fluid motions.

    It could just be that I need to increase the rate of acceleration and deceleration of what I already have, but then comes the issue of having an invisible boundary to prevent the player ship from being off-screen for too long.

  • After reading up on lerp, wouldn't that mean stopping a ship and having it turn and fire? I figure that would make the AI seem more controlled than it already is.

    Unless you had another idea in mind.

  • This is something I've been trying to do for several weeks now. For those who have never played SPAZ or seen the main menu, I've created a recording of it below:

    [TUBE]Da17jAE6zb0[/TUBE]

    The way the AI ships move around and fire at each other looks just so fluid. I've been trying to capture this same look, but I just can't seem to get it right.

    Here's what I have so far:

    • Several 'atmosphere' layers for the background. These move at different speeds and create a subtle dynamic that is barely noticeable to prevent the user from thinking the background is stagnant.
    • AI ships are physics operated. Basically the Ai ships will seek out the player ship until they come within a certain range, and then they will reverse acceleration to give the impression of kiting and strafing (prevents 'dumb' AI that simply flies toward the player ship at all times).
    • The player ship turns and seeks out the closest enemy ship and flies toward it until it gets within a certain range, then it reverses acceleration (just like the enemy ships) to give the impression of strafing.
    • Both AI and the player ship use the turret behavior and will only fire if in range.

    Unlike SPAZ, which features several ships randomly flying around and fighting each other, I was hoping to have a main menu featuring the player ship flying around and taking on enemy ships. Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve my main menu? Particular troubles I'm having are:

    • How do I keep the player ship on screen for most of the time? It seems to fly off-screen a lot because I'm not sure how to create an invisible boundary that would cause it (and the enemy ships) to reverse accelerate away from it.
    • Fluidity. The way the AI ships move in the SPAZ main menu is fast and very fluid, whereas mine looks very controlled (because it is). Any ideas on how to make my implementation more fluid? I'm not sure how I would code in dynamic ship stops and sudden direction changes like in SPAZ

    This .capx is huge and not for those new to C2. This may be too big of a question to ask on this specific forum, but I've been beating my head for a few weeks now wondering how the creators of SPAZ did it. Any tips/suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

    Icarus.capx

  • The 'log' action seems interesting, but it feels painful to log lots of actions in this way when a step-through debugger could be used.

    I've definitely looked through the updates since the last time I touched C2 and the line-of-sight behavior definitely seems the most interesting at this point.

    Bookmarking seems like a great way to mark aspects of the project as 'to-dos' for later or for marking certain sections as potential causes for a bug that's going on.

    I am mainly seeking an official developer response on any sort of debugger progress.

  • It's been two months since I last touched C2 (took a break after a tornado hit my house in May) and even though I've saved my developer notes on my projects, opening them up and trying to get started on fixing bugs I noted two months ago is incredibly painful.

    My case may be somewhat of a special one, but I do recall a poll several months ago asking what feature users wanted most. Debugger may not have made #1 but it definitely is a feature C2 needs. Is there any word on any sort of progress on this?

    It would definitely help us get our programs running faster :D

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  • Dave Hailwood

    Thank you for the kind and wonderful comments! I'm not sure where I want to take my game next. I live in Oklahoma, and we were hit by an EF5 tornado this Monday that wrecked my neighborhood. My house is still mostly intact, but we can't drink the water here and electricity is expected to be out for the next couple of weeks.

    As for my space shooter, I want to put it off until multiplayer support is better in C2. I understand there are some plugins to make realtime multiplayer work, but for now I have my sights on developing a turn-based strategy game that takes place on a board, so you may be hearing from me soon with some questions about implementation ;)

  • farflamex

    I have to agree with your analysis of Newgrounds. I have received several 0 votes for submitting "just another asteroid shooter" when another asteroid shooter placed in the top 8.

    Overall, I'm not really a fan of the NG community as much more than a place to get basic feedback on a game. The community is largely full of kids who do not provide the sort of feedback we could really use to make our games better.