jakobdam's Forum Posts

  • This is a basic thing to add in normal programming, but I can't for the life of me find out how to do it in Construct 2...

    Fx. the number 1,000,000,000 looks quite unreadable when displayed as 1000000000...

    I'm making a game for which this will eventually be an issue (the user must be able to quickly read and compare very large numbers; billions to trillions to quadrillions etc.).

    Edit:

    My current workaround which I'll have to use if I can't display the thousands separator, would be IF-statements;

    fx. this (it was faster to just type like this than explain how to drag/drop in Construct 2)...:

    if (variable > 999999) { variable = (variable/1000000) & "million" }

    Btw. I also thought about counthing the string length for each number, then breaking it apart in to a certain number of variables, then reassembling into one number with my , separator in between... but I certainly hope that there's a more nice solution ^_^

  • It's browser dependant.

    Internet Explorer 10 and earlier does NOT support WebGL.

    But IE 11 and onwards DOES.

    Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (the other major PC browsers) all supports WebGL.

    It's NOT dependant on operating system as winsonzhong indicates, but solely on the browser installed.

    Construct 2 does, however, have Canvas fallback, which is supported from earlier versions of Internet Explorer such as 9 and 10.

    Personally, I'm doing an Internet Explorer version check; if earlier than 11, the visitor will get a "please choose another browser" screen, with links to Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

    As webGL must be part of the browser javascript engine, it's not something you can just install separately.

    Worth noticing; WebGL version 2 is coming soon - and it'll have a lot more features and better performance than the current WebGL version 1.

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  • Well, the last time I had the opportunity to buy a very cheap iMac with PowerPC (RISC) processor, a friend of mine told the seller what we were gonna use it for; highspeed photography of it. While it explodes from being dropped more than 10 meters... (we're both photographers, and I have sound triggers for the flashes, which means we can get consistently solid results). Upon hearing that, the seller refused to sell us the iMac...

    Such old technology is of no practical use nowadays; it consumes way too much power - and even your mobile phone can probably match the processing power. At a fraction of the power consumption. If you're good with tools, you can maybe use it to rebuild it into a cool speaker or a stand for a table top, but that's about as much use as I imagine one can find for it.

    PowerPCs were the competitors to the Pentium II - 4 generations, if my memory serves me correct, and they were pretty much on par (well, AMD won that race back then, with their Athlon 64 / 64 X2) - and I couldn't for the life of me find anything I'd like to use such systems for. It's like trying to find a practical use for an old pair of worn trousers that're too small. Sure, you could try and make them into shorts which wouldn't solve the size issue at the waist though - but the funniest thing would probably be to make them into a bag or something completely different... ^_^

  • Ah yes - but in my opinion, the Macbook Pro and the Surface each have their strengths and weaknesses. I see what you're getting at though, and there's one more thing you may find appealing with the Macbook; it's a Mac - which means you can submit content to appstore from it. I'm an avid Windows user, but I love the iPhone and iPad, and I'm considering my options for a Mac right now. Money is not the issue, but getting a thing that I can stand is what I need to decide; I'm probably gonna go cheap and buy a used Mac Mini, because about the only thing I'm gonna use it for, will be submitting the damn apps & games to the AppStore. ^_^

    If I were not interested in submitting to the appStore, however, I wouldn't go Mac; yeah sure, boot camp makes running Windows natively (no virtualization) possible, but having two different eco systems on one computer, will give me desaturated hairs in unwanted places. ^_^

  • Problem #1:

    It's not possible to do directly, but make a standard sprite on TOP of your TiledBG, then set opacity for this new sprite to 0 and use the sprite for collision detection.

    Problem #2:

    I'm new to Construct 2 myself, and 9patch is one of the objects I haven't gotten around to play with. But as the 9patch is meant for scaling simple geometry out of aspect, without the weird things that happens as standard, I'm thinking you may be using 9patch the wrong place...? What I mean is; how about dropping 9patch and make a sprite instead? Then rotation, set angle etc. is easily solved.

  • Surface 2 PRO is a fine tool; I've tried it several times, and tested many types of applications on it. A solid Windows (8.1) experience.

    I'd think that the major drawback for using it with Construct 2, is the small screen size vs. high resolution. This gives you an insane PPI, which can make stuff hard to see and work with.

    Also worth mentioning is that Surface Pro 3 has arrived;

    microsoft.com/surface/da-dk ... face-pro-3

    • Even if you don't need those specs, the Surface Pro 2 price will drop signicantly, as the Pro 3 replaces the Pro 2 on the store shelves.

    One major drawback on the Pro 3, is that the pen touch is made by N-Trig, whereas Pro 2 has Wacom pen touch.

    I by FAR prefer Wacom; not because the precision is all that much better than N-Trig when we're talking these types of screens, but the DRIVER that N-Trig provides, is worth less than a stick in a dog shit. Photoshop, Paint Tool SAI etc. all requires a working WINTAB driver, for them to support pressure sensitive pen input; and N-Trig's Wintab driver is the worst - barely working, if at all. There's forum threads all over the internet with people having had and still having issues getting the damn thing to work; whereas Wacom always just works.

    So for me, the Surface Pro 2 is the most interesting, especially because I don't need the 2160x1440 resolution of the Pro 3.

  • Btw. - realtime raytracing doesn't exist in any full fledged game engine yet.

    Upcoming BRIGADE can do the trick:

    youtube.com/watch

    youtube.com/watch

    But notice the specs; two powerful NVidia desktop graphics cards; and still, the performance sucks. But it's definitely the future.

    I'm educated 3D animator, so I'm looking very much forward to realtime raytracing.

    But there's another solution; voxel-cone raytracing. This SHOULD have existed in Unreal Engine 4, but was taken out, due to performance issues on latest generation consoles (XBox ONE and PlayStation 4). UNITY can do it, however, so it IS coming, and when it does, it's gonna be an important step towards true raytracing.

    The solution that's used now, in all modern 3D engines, including Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine, is called screen spaced reflections. Sure, they look ok, as in they're a huge step over plan texture baking which was modern 10 years ago; but now, the time is coming for raytracing.

  • My gaming laptop (2x NVidia GT 755M, 16 GB RAM, i7 4700MQ CPU) ran at ~8 fps, and ended up crashing both the NVidia driver and the WebGL part of Chrome (latest stable).

    So, this benchmark is not really good.

    Try this instead:

    goodboydigital.com/pixijs/bunnymark

    => There's a HUGE difference between iOS 7 Safari and iOS 7 Chrome (which cannot use the faster nitro engine or jit or anything that matters because of Apple's closed iOS 7 policy).

    => The difference is equally huge between iOS 7 Safari and iOS 8 Safari - and THAT'S where it becomes interesting. Notice how many sprites that can be rendered - at 60 fps!!! That's INSANE!

  • Thanks a lot ^_^ ...

    I'm also considering doing more for a little more diverse gameplay. I'm well aware that the original incarnations of this type of game (click jumpers - a helicopter game was the first, I think) won hearts because of the very simple pick-up-and-play style, but I don't think people would mind a little more complications.

    At least I can change the background graphics and the bars upon reaching a certain amount of points, and I can make small powerups by accumulating the score (fx. if you score 20 in one game and 10 in another, the accumulated score would be 30) - and thus unlock different cows; or maybe powerups (invincibility to obstacles, "follow the cursor/finger" etc....

    I'm on my third game with Construct 2 - this was the first, and a skeleton for a chain event type game was the second (it's here on the forum, including the .capx for everyone to use) - the third game is cookie clicker clone, and it already works with clicks and auto clickers, animated background (particles) etc...

    So lots of stuff on my to-do list; being a graphics designer, I sooooo enjoy that the programming part is SO EASY and FAST now; back when I did ActionScript (Flash), Java and even HTML 5 through the Phaser framework, every behavior took AGES to program. Now it's a few mouse clicks and voilá...

    Especially the chain event type game; I remember fiddling with the programming for weeks; I had to compare 2 arrays which kept changing size and thus had to be rearranged on the run, with each other, on every frame. That thing, in and on itself for a non-expert like me, was a hard thing to do - especially to do RIGHT, with all collisions behaving nicely and everything running smooth; in Construct 2, it took me less than 1 hour. I was kinda freaked when it worked and I even kinda forced my girlfriend to see how easy it was with Construct 2, then went on to show her the source code for the ActionScript game I made back then, to compare the complexity... ^_^

  • IndieKiwi -

    It's not particles that I use for collision - I use an old trick; I spawn an invisible circle (sprite). Along with this circle is also spawned the particles.

    In runtime; the circle expands its diameter, and the circle is used for collision detection.

    This is the exact same way I made an actionscript 3 (flash) game of the same type, a few years ago - and back then, performance was dazzlingly good, even on weaker computers and with many objects. Thus, the great performance stealer is not the particles - but the £$! rotation.... ^_^

    As this is kind of a "tech demo", more for showing the performance and game mechanics, I haven't made any load balancing.

    I want to make this game different than the majority of chain reaction games; typically, you only have 1 click; I want to work on ideas with power ups to enable more clicks.

    Thanks for feedback!

  • A0Nasser >

    Thanks for the tip!

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  • It's hard to say what the issue is, without having seen your code. I began using Construct 2 only 4 days ago, and after having made my initial game, performance was great on iPad (4th gen) but sucked on my iPhone 5. Especially if I increased my particle count (my scene spawns particles everytime a mouse button is pressed).

    And so began the optimizing...

    What I found - I hope you can find some of it useful:

    • Enable WebGL; iOS 8 will have WebGL, and it's MUCH MUCH MUCH faster than Canvas in all respects.
    • Avoid using new layers unnecessarily; blend objects into the same layer if possible.
    • Remember to destroy your objects/instances.
    • If you have stuff that rotates, try to remove the rotation.

    In the project settings:

    • Change sampling from linear to point; this gives a HUGE performance boost on mobile
    • Set pixel rounding to "On" - this can also give a big performance boost

    Last, try and test your project if you resample everything to fit 500px height. Maybe it's fast for you to do this check - if not, just use some dummy graphics with lots of details and colors, and basic scrolling behavior. This should give an indicator if it's worth pursuing this path.

  • hneuman - you can download my capx and see how, but here's the short version:

    On your ball, simply add the Bullet behavior. Then set "Bounche off solids" to "Yes".

    Now create 4 walls (you can import graphics of a square and define it as a sprite 4 times); then give each wall sprite the Solid behavior.

    That's it - without adding any events, your ball can now bounce off of things

    Btw., are you Brazilian...? Am I mistaken or is your game in portuguese...?