Fimbul's Forum Posts

  • Be aware that laws vary country by country, and that legal advice over the internet is difficult and, in most cases, downright dangerous.

    In addition, it is useful to create a new thread for each topic, if the topics are unrelated - for instance, you'd create one for your legal questions and one for your capx problem. This helps people with similar questions find what they're looking for without having to create a topic.

    In relation to your questions:

    • You can sell your game if all of my sprites, music, and programming are homemade and original. You could even include third party assets if you have written, explicit permission from the copyright owner (usually the author, but in some cases the publisher) or if the item's license explicitly allows it - for instance, all of my plugins/behaviors (as of this post) are free, including for commercial use - though I appreciate being mentioned in the credits. Keep in mind, however, that some things are protected, such certain names and drawings - you cannot make a megaman clone with the exact same characters, names and setting, even if you draw and program them yourself - though you can create a megaman clone, with the same visual/audio style and mechanics, as long as you name it something like HyperMaxiMan - though this practice is frowned upon by everyone, and you likely won't get many sales (there are exceptions to this rule, but you must fully understand what you are doing and for what purpose before you consciously make the decision to break the rule).
    • You do not need a Construct 2 business license to sell your games, and there is no such thing as a "resale" license, AFAIK. You only need a business license if you're running a "for profit" organization or if you make more than $5000 in profits using c2
    • You don't "get" a copyright. Again, this varies from country to country, but in most places there is no actual paperwork involved in copyrighting something. You just include some text somewhere like "copyright [yourname] [year the thing was first released], all rights reserved". This is enough to protect you from most thieves, but you might want some extended legal protection if you're creating the next angry birds, in which case consult with a lawyer.

  • I propose a workaround that makes tools viable and doesn't require a major re-engineering of C2:

    Whenever you are working on a project, construct will "save" that project on a temp folder. If changes are made to that folder by an external application, construct simply reopens the project.

    Since the XML format is easy to read and modify, and a file modification would trigger a c2 reload, modifying the project is easy (if a bit hackish).

    This solves all the points mentioned above, and with a bit more work could even mean something like deeper spriter-construct integration or a RPG Toolkit, while at the same time being easy to implement.

    If construct ignores unknown tags or provides a tag that will be ignored (such as <extension>) it becomes possible to save tool information along with the project.

    Further improvements could include a way to trigger construct to save the currently open project (instead of it automatically saving from time to time), a way to trigger a reload (instead of it constantly checking for modifications) and a way to add "toolbars" to construct, with buttons and controls that invoke programs (with commandline parameters) - said toolbars can even be extended to be context sensitive, or be able to open menus. Such a solution is cheaper to make than a C++ SDK while maintaining construct itself clean and unbloated and leveraging the power of c2's open XML format.

  • I've been a game designer for a long time, but only recently (3~ years) decided to study it seriously, purchasing books, reading postmortems, blogs, watching projects by other indies, and one thing that pops up constantly is the fact that indies who code their own engines from scratch fail more often than indies that use a ready made engine.

    This should be obvious to some - an engine being developed actively has had more time to mature, more testing (and less bugs), and in the case of companies like Scirra, you can be assured technical support when things get ugly.

    I moved away from MMF because it didn't seem like a professional product - very few people had commercial success with it, and most told stories of struggling hard with the engine, many projects (real time strategy games, for instance) were theoretically possible - all elements could be made - but the code became so spaghetti that coding an entire game with it became unfeasible.

    When I made the move, I thought a lot about whether I should get a "real" coding engine or stick with something visual, and ended up here, because I believe this style of programming can be made just as powerful as written code.

    In my experience with construct, however, you often have to break out an editor and hack together a plugin to work on a more difficult task (such as dynamically loading a sprite's image via a url you got from an ajax response consisting of an array of objects). I have no problems with that, and when I have time I polish my plugins/behaviors and release them to the public.

    I am, however, missing something most successful engines have, and that is felt throughout the forums: a way to customize construct itself.

    Many users request things like "automatically snap to grid", tile based map making, sprite sheet importing, stuff that could easily be done if we had a way to hook into construct 2 itself and extend it. You could make a system to iterate over all your objects marked as "enemies", add the "health" property and set it's initial value to a file stored somewhere. You could even make an "enemy editor" that would create code for those enemies based on some properties fine-tuned to your game.

    Think about how extremely hard it is right now to make something as simple as dialog trees, which are essential to RPG games - how would you do it? Hardcode each line? Then when you change the name of one of the characters, what do you do? You can't just "search and replace". And if the solution is to open the XML files generated by construct and edit them , you end up with a tool that require a crooked workflow: save project -> close construct -> open tool -> modify files -> close tool -> open construct -> hope nothing breaks, and you'll resist upgrading, because it might break your tool.

    So, my question is, will we have a way to properly communicate with construct, telling it to spawn IDE elements, execute actions on the users behalf, save modifications in the tool into the project and so on?

  • if you placed it in \ htdocs \ construct then you should request localhost/construct/jax.php instead of localhost/jax.php

  • maybe something can be added to the spec, where a file created by your app can always be updated/deleted by your app?

  • Please please please make a json object capable of traversing complex objects! If not, I'll have to make one (that uses expressions like jquery) myself :(

  • Well yeah, you never used the debugger because it doesn't exist.

    The creation of one, which would include many things such as variable inspection during the runtime, could also offer the possibility to display collision polygons (or even other nice stuff such as displaying movement vectors, revealing invisible objects and editing objects' variables).

    But I also agree that an option to display collision polygons in the editor be nice.

  • This looks like a subfeature of the "debugger". It was an option in the poll a while ago.

  • It could be done, but it would help reverse-engineers because then C2 has to include a full list of all object names. Currently it obfuscates all object names to make it harder to understand the exported project. So are you sure you want it when it makes reverse-engineer's lives easier?

    hashmap the names, make the compiler ensure all existing names produce unique hashes.

    you can use a fast one-way hashing that's not cryptographically safe (you could even use one of those ultra-fast XOR hashes, since the compiler will be doing the collision checking)

  • Wow, if it's running things twice, it's definitely a bug! Otherwise, what's the point? We'd just copy the events and switch around the conditions!

  • Wouldn't scraping reviews be a better approach?

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  • "Jesus Christ", can you please do your research before you post something like this?

    The only sources I could find of the incident are christian propaganda sites. There is no reputable news source noticing the event, the article jumps to conclusions (shiny clothes, wounded hands, helps people = must be Jesus), doesn't cite sources and asks you to "share"

    Even snopes disproves it (hey, you're the one who told me to "google it" - it was on the first page).

    • What were the girl's names?
    • What's the muslin man's name?
    • Who found the kids?
    • What's "egyptian national tv"'s name?
    • Which muslim woman news anchor?
    • Why can't a child make up a story like this?
    • When will the man be executed?
    • Hell, when did this news come out?

    Come on, this is widely known netiquette, it doesn't even need to be stated as a forum rule. Also, the bigoted and biased nature of the article, which portrays muslims as barbaric people and Jesus Christ as the supreme savior does no one a favor.

    This is grounds for post deletion (or even worse, in some forums). The only reason I am responding instead of reporting is because I am not certain it constitutes "hateful rhetoric", since the bigotry is somewhat veiled.

    Quoting Hoax Slayer, "In a world troubled by faith-based violence and misunderstanding, false stories such as this can only add to existing divisions and circulating them will serve no good purpose."

  • Unless you're talking about hiring, I can't make any sense of the "USA only" policy either. A lot of people in this forum either are from other countries or work with people from other countries.

    If you intend to limit your market to the US alone, excluding everyone else (artists, designers, testers, localization people, marketers), you'll likely find very few people for your venture, even if you do find enough programmers.

    I am certain you have valid reasons (I can think of a couple), but I'd like to know what they are so that we're better prepared for future opportunities.

    Edit: Also, you're aware that spambots lurk these forums harvesting e-mails, right?

  • Hmm, having thought on this some more I think I'm persuaded by the "keep it simple" argument.

    Initially I'll release it as a logic-only "last event did not run". We'll see how things pan out there.

    Yes, but it won't be a simple condition, right? That way lies madness.

  • > ... Besides, online multiplayer for HTML5 isn't even a thing that exists...

    BrowserQuest

    I misspoke. I meant realtime multiplayer. You can see there is a HUGE delay even in the promo video, and you may notice the game is quite short. Even that Rawkets game, which was kind of realtime, is never online anymore. Websockets are not viable for multiplayer, IMO.