kabuto202's Forum Posts

  • Alpha masks would be neat.

  • I can, but it's fairly barren. What I'm basically trying to do is get the "fog of war" effect such as in Monaco (http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2013/04/ ... header.jpg). The reason why I see shadow light as the optimal solution is because it's already rendering on the pixels that I want to be rendered, except instead of changing them to (1,1,1,255) I want to make the pixels on the layer directly on or below the shadow light transparent (1,1,1,0).

    If this isn't something possible to do in editor, could some-one point me in the direction of where I can find it in the SDK?

  • In short, I have have a Shadow Light on Layer 2, I have Sprites on Layer 1, and I have a pink background on Layer 0. What shader-fu do I need to do so, so that if a shadow was to overlap with any pixels on layer 1, it would turn their alpha/opacity to zero?

    EDIT: Alternatively we can remove Layer 2 and just have the Shadow Light on Layer 1.

  • Hey, pardon if this is a fairly frequently asked question, but I haven't worked with Construct in a while.I noticed for some tasks it would be a lot faster to write a straight up JS function. Without creating an entire new plug-in, is it possible to pass some parameters to a JS function that gets called with those parameters and returns a value?

  • Ah, curses! thanks for the quick response

  • I like it, I think it has a lot of potential here are some of my suggestions:

    1) Use acceleration and give the player two speeds of travel. One of the things that frustrated me is that since there's a single velocity, in order to proceed through some parts of the level you essentially had to move pixel-perfect to how the designer wanted you too, but as we know all successful platformers never do that give the player plenty of opportunity to maneuver (Super Meat Boy or the Mario Games.)

    2) Make the slide get released the moment when the player releases the key. The way the slide works right now is a big no-no in my opinion. The most important thing in a platformer is control, so when a player is forced to slide for a certain duration, expect frustration. Ideally the slide maximum duration should be based on the player's velocity.

    3) Introduce gameplay elements more gradually. This is just a personal preference, but I like it when new gameplay elements are introduced gradually, one at time so I can quickly pick up what they're supposed to do. It's even better when they're introduced in a risk free situation. An example would be that when the first the player encounters to blue jump boosters, should be when he's running on a flat surface, with an elevated surface in front of him. The maximum distance of when a jump can be initiated to reach it should be where the jump booster is located, so the player is automatically jumped there. This does two things: 1) Instantly teach the player what it does without other stressful influences. 2) Instills the idea that the player would have to use them to progress through the level.

    Best of luck!

  • Does Construct check at the start of the event (before the first loop is ran) and simply loops the action X amount of times, or does Construct check at the end of each loop to see if the number of loops is has performed is >= X?

    My issue is that I'm working on a random level generator, and because I'm not brilliant enough to write an a perfect algorithm I simply want Construct to check if the last placement of structures is legal, and if not to delete the last structure placed and to add another structure to be placed (by increasing the loop count) to offset it. As you can guess this is only possible if Construct's Repeat event in the latter manner.

  • Clarify: "it didn't work". What was the result of the experiment that led you to conclude, that "it didn't work."

  • I'm prolly gonna post it one my dev blog when I get it up. But the full system wouldn't be finished anytime soon, since I'm currently doing code/art/design on and off.

  • Alright, everything seems to work fine. Thanks a bunch!

  • I was referring to the plugin. I was planning to use "|" as the seperator, but I have two questions. How would I go about accessing a local .txt? I tried using just "test.txt" and "localhost://test.txt" (Test "test.txt" file is located inside the project folder.)

    How would I detect the line breaks with tokenat()? Or is there command in Construct that could detect those?

    EDIT: Nevermind, I'll just use the plugin, it seems easy enough to work with.

  • Your avatar essentially sums up my reaction to reading your post.

    Thanks a bunch mate, I planning at hacking away at those aspects all by lone some up and here you have brought me a perfectly feasible system and a fully commented .capx file with everything I need to import a .txt! I have to admit I'm fairly speechless, all that's pretty much left for me is play around with some of the design elements and figure out how CSV works.

    Edit: I actually just realized that I probably won't even need CSV, I could just parse them using tokenat()

  • Thanks a bunch Kyatric. I guess the most logical course of action right now would be to put off creating the dialog system for a few weeks and see if Yann posts the file. If he doesn't I'll try to hack away at it using the 2D array. Though I should play around with the CSV plugin for a bit.

    EDIT: And I just noticed all the grammatical errors in my main post, I should get some sleep.

  • The only thing I found that's a "Dialog" plugin is this.

    But, as far as I can tell it's purpose isn't remotely related to what I need. Could you link me to the plugin that you were talking about?

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  • So I'm kind of stumped to what might be the best approach here. I'm working on a dialog system a like to Alpha Protocol. Essentially multiple choices with varying effects. For simplicity's sake let's say the actual dialog is hidden until the player makes a choice based on a single word in the dialog box representing the tone of the response.

    Now, since the game is going to include a lot of dialog I wan't to avoid making the 20+ actions for each dialog prompt required and I rather just use a cookie cutter system.

    The cleanest method would be to use .txt file and simply parse out the dialog and various variables for each option. Unfortunately as far as I can Construct doesn't have that function and I doubt I'd be able to programmer a parser as I know next to nothing about them (I'm probably even using the the wrong term.)

    Looking at some of the plugins I came across the associative list plugin, while it's certainly better then the first option that's still up to 6 keys/values per dialog option and once again very messy.

    Right now the best looking approach to me is to store all the data in a 2D array. This would however concern me with loading times, since as far as I can tell there is no way change the "defualt" values of an array in Scirra outside runtime, and loading several thousand lines values at once could make for some mean loading times especially in a browser. The other option would be to make a separate array for each instance of player dialog and simply store the responses and their associated variables in those. While slightly more difficult to edit then the previous option, this would yield better loading times and make easier to access the actual data.

    Anything I overlooked or suggestions for a better implementation? I'd like some feedback before I start cracking out a system that turns out to be bust and ineffective.