Jase00's Forum Posts

  • The way I look at it, is there are 3 resources to find out the answer to your own questions: Examples in C3 (visual material), documentation on the website (reading material), or "How Do I" section on the forums. Obviously it's great when you get all the information you need from an example or the documentation, but it's nice to know that generally someone on the forums will be happy to help, including the staff of Scirra at times as they're often engaging with posts on the forum.

    The manual isn't a tutorial per say, it's more of a reference to get a bit more info about what things do in C3. Sometimes the manual isn't descriptive enough, perhaps that is the case with speech synthesis.

  • I agree in some ways, I find it can be a memory game when using C3 in certain cases (e.g. For me, when working across multiple event sheets, it can be easy to get a bit lost (the bookmark bar needs a bit of love as it's too simple)).

    With layouts and layers being selected or locked, let's say you needed to make a change to the HUD layer on 20 layouts: once you have done 2 or 3 layouts, wouldn't you sorta get into a pattern of "click next layout, click HUD layer, make change, click next layout, click HUD layer, make change"?

    With determining which objects are on which layer, I agree that perhaps there could be a way to easily tell which objects are on which layer quicker, but generally wouldn't you know "oh this object is the score text, so this must be on the HUD layer. This is the ground, which will be on the Game layer." etc. Unless your game is a layer-heavy game and objects go between different layers often.

    I personally don't lock many layers at once, because I have like 20 or 30 layers, so I tend to lock things when I go to click the object I want, realise something is above the object, and because I've clicked this other object, I look over at the properties bar, see the layer this object is on (e.g its on the Debug layer), so THEN I lock the debug layer and continue what I was doing (then I might forget to unlock the layer, but that's my own fault really).

    I also use C3 when sleep deprived! When I'm TOO sleep deprived, I start to notice the quality of my events gets worse, and how slow I am at solving issues, so I tend to stop and just go to bed, otherwise I will end up wasting my time the next day by cleaning up the mess I created the previous night when I was sleep deprived.

  • Glad it worked! No problem.

    It worried me when this first happened, because "what if CTRL+S corrupts my project as its currently crashed?" but thankfully in this case, it's fine.

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  • Does CTRL+S save?

    I've seen this bug, even on paid login, something to do with image editor when you click the little close button, it sometimes just locks up, but you can usually do keyboard shortcut to save - hopefully this works even if you are logged out.

  • I don't think your ideas are bad, Tiny Martian.

    Scirra are definitely assessing all feedback and it's in their best interest to execute this new product correctly, especially when they're stepping into new competitive territory.

    If they don't acknowledge something you've said, don't worry! Maybe they can't acknowledge some stuff, because if they find that they cannot execute the idea correctly, then they will have to disappoint everyone that was hyped for it.

    I have mentioned "drawing tools" twice, but I don't believe it's been acknowledged (IMO it's odd noone else has mentioned drawing tools? Don't animators prefer to draw their animations directly onto their background, rather than opening the sprite editor, drawing, then placing?). However, I keep it in mind that Scirra reads everything here and at least the idea is in their minds now. Do I even deeply care if drawing tools are added? No not really, I'm not an animator, but I do know 1 person that I could get interested in Construct Animate, but they immediately don't like the fact that they can't just draw an animation like Flash does. They like to look at the scenery/background and draw onto it with layers. Like how do you neatly animate 2 different people walking up to each other and then they shake hands? Well, without drawing tools, you could use the Image Editor and predict how to animate each sprite individually, or maybe do some awkward switch-over where the 2 people become 1 sprite once they are close together... Or, like, you could make the sprites in other software first, then import them into Construct Animate!... That'd be ridiculous if you need other animation software to use Construct Animate. Ahh sorry for going off on this point too much, but you see, perhaps I've convinced you how important this is, but I've posted 2 times about this, and no comment from Scirra, BUT they are aware at least.

    Construct Animate must be easy and powerful to use, much like C3 is for game dev. Easy for a beginner, powerful for someone who's stuck with the software and mastered it. Any weird setups for a Timeline need to be addressed, and also, don't think that it's up to you or the community to find the solution to UI or UX problems in Construct Animate, like the whole "technically, what is the most bottom layer" question - Scirra are UI and UX designers, I mean the design of event sheet view is god-tier. They can solve it, that's their job, even if we feel like we must find solutions (we are all technical-minded problem-solving people, after all).

    If they ignore issues that you post, then others will post the feedback too and maybe it will open their eyes to the idea. So it's always good to post feedback. Even if Scirra defend something, you should respond to that if you feel confident in your stance. We aren't here to fight or argue, we just want to explain our experiences and opinions to hopefully aid Scirra in making the right decisions for their software.

    Sometimes a back-and-forth can entice others to jump in and pick a side - If everyone disagrees with you, then perhaps you might change your mind (or perhaps everyone is completely missing your point lol), and if everyone sided against Scirra view, then, well, we did our part as a community and its simply up for them to decide.

  • I wonder if this will work when creating new objects then calling function in same event. Or, if that doesn't work, adding a wait 0 seconds before calling the function. When I'm home, I'll be playing around with this!

  • I wonder if drawing tools are on the cards at all. Like not "going into a sprite, draw, then place on layout", but drawing directly onto the layout, kinda like flash? Draw directly into layers or something, even if behind-the-scenes this gets converted into a sprite.

    I ask, as this is the one thing preventing a friend from trying Construct Animate, as they want to draw a background, then draw a character on top of the background so they get the scaling and perspective correct. But right now, you have to go into the sprite editor, which means you have to guess how it will look once placed onto the layout. Sure we can resize sprites, but they're raster images, so they won't look smooth if suddenly resized.

    You may have a point, but you post reads like a drunk person raging about Construct 3 templates. You seem passionate, but presenting it in a public forum post where you are swearing everywhere, it comes off as aggressive, and you are insulting the work from the devs (particularly the programmers) that created these templates rather than calmly explaining why you feel the templates are not good from an educational standpoint. Maybe edit your post to ease the tone of it, just so we can have a conversation and not get this post locked?

    I looked at the same ghost template, and I completely agree about the comments, it was kinda funny how little they explain. Some comments are like "initialise the car" then below it is a bunch of sin/cos math with seemingly random numbers picked for it - the comments don't explain roughly what they are doing, or why they chose specific values in their math.

    I guess where do you stop with comments? I'd expect detailed comments in beginner templates, but when it is an advanced template, perhaps it is more about advanced users taking a peek and changing a thing or two in order to learn, rather than reading comments to learn.

  • The best thing to do, is whilst the game is running, every second, update a variable to the current date, and make sure to save this so this can be loaded in future.

    Then, say 3 weeks pass and you open your game, you will have the old date from 3 weeks ago, and you can compare it to today's date, and with these two dates, you can figure out how many Sundays have occurred, and add this to a "number of Sundays" variable.

  • I'm only saying I trust Scirra, I wasn't trying to insult anyone. I'll be an unhappy customer if C3's development noticeably slows down due to attention to C3 Animate.

    If I could choose, I'd wish Scirra could focus full time on C3. I do hope Scirra expand as a company and get more staff on board sooner rather than later.

  • I guess it's possible for Scirra to focus on both products - I believe it was mentioned that they silently worked on C3 Animate for the past year (iirc), which is a bit odd now that I think about it because it took a year(?) to add video export? If hypothetically they focused more time on this video export to get it done in a few months, then would C3 development have slowed down during this time?

    Perhaps development will be a bit slower whenever a major feature is being focused on - Like if Scirra wanted to add drawing tools to C3 Animate, we might see less stuff getting implemented in C3 during this time. I know there's not just 1 programmer so maybe someone can still work on a major feature in C3 during this time, but there was a time where all staff were focused ONLY on C3.

    But! Scirra could afford more staff when they get even more cash flow from this new product for a new demograph. Maybe there will be teething issues, like with any new thing or any shift in workload, but I do trust they've thought this through.

  • Yeah sorry for rambling about the suggestions platform as it is offtopic - It's exciting to think about being able to influence the future of C3 a little bit, but like you say, it's been discussed over and over, with the same outcome usually.

    Whilst I do agree with the idea and it is surprising that the effect parameters weren't exposed everywhere from the beginning, I wonder if this is one of those cases where Scirra will think "Well, it can be worked around, therefore should we focus our limited resources on this?". Again, I totally agree with the suggestion, but, well, small team, limited resources. I know we all know that.

  • Yeah I don't visit the suggestions platform often, infact I more often visit the bug github just to see what things are getting reported and the little technical discussions that sometimes happen - It can be quite interesting!

    On the suggestions platform, sorted by popular:

    In 5th place, with 34 votes, existed for a year, no Scirra response, and it's not exactly a complicated idea (add BBoxMid), yet very handy (Not that I expect Scirra to add it, but it has existed for a year, it is one of the top 5 most voted, and no response?)

    In 4th place, with 38 votes, 6 months old, this suggestion has been answered by Scirra back in February as "already implemented", yet it sits there high up on the list, not hidden, and the people that contributed to the 38 votes are not moving their votes elsewhere.

    In 3rd place, with 40 votes, 10 months old, and this is about image points on 3d objects - Scirra isn't convinced by it (which is fair enough), but no discussion has happened on the comments there from the community, noone else chimed in to say "here's a good example of why this would be a good suggestion", yet its 3rd place of all popular suggestions. Why aren't the people that voted for this writing a quick comment like "I would use this feature to create blahblah effect in 3D" or something?

    In 2nd place, 42 votes, a year old, no response from Scirra.

    1st place has 54 votes but this is marked as "in development" so this is cool.

    This makes me think even if I put effort into writing a detailed suggestion and getting many people to vote for it and made it to the top 5 most voted, it may still take a year or more to get a response, or maybe never get a response at all. I acknowledge Scirra is busy, small team, lots of work to do, but... Yeah I don't know.

  • I don't have much input, but I always use Chrome for C3, and I am not experiencing any issues you describe. I use regular Chrome, no extensions at all.

    You could try other chromium-based browsers, such as Edge or Brave? It's so strange how Firefox works just fine for you. Hmm...

  • If you could disable delta time on behaviours, and you design your game around 60fps, then 2 problems would occur:

    If the framerate goes below 60fps, then you will see the behaviours work in slow-motion.

    If the framerate goes above 60fps (e.g. Someone uses a monitor or phone that supports 120hz), then you will see the behaviours speed up really fast.

    There isn't much you can do to fix this, except by using delta time.