Lost my Keys's Forum Posts

  • there's alot of zdepth and 3d mesh problems, I've posted the transparency ones and the ones where it disappears near the edges of the screen, and I think I may have posted the effects one as well to the tracker

    you should report the other stuff you mentioned to the bug tracker

    the z stuff is the stuff I'm most excited about, my whole game is gonna be full of z_ness

    Same, I know exactly how I want things to look and having the z-depth is an important factor in doing it properly.

    The frustrating part is it's SO CLOSE to being just right and working great. The ones you posted are the ones I really need to be working, I can fake/live without the others for the time being, even though effects not working when used with z-depth is annoying.

    Hopefully David or Ashley will reply and give a timeframe on the possibility of them being fixed, cause I can't swap the artwork around once its done.

    Would be awesome if it's all fixed and working in the next version, but I've heard nothing about this side of things.

  • HELLO. I don't really bother with the forum much these days since the IRC channel is generally busy, except right now, lol. So figured I'd make a post here about these problems.

    So yeah, anyone know fixes to the following?

    Effects don't work/don't work correctly when used on anything that has a z-depth other than it's default 0.

    Meshes don't sort correctly at times, regardless of their z-depth.

    Meshes with transparent textures not correctly showing meshes behind them (only 100% transparency seems to work properly unless using a layer per mesh).

    Graphic errors at edges of distorted mesh (colored pixels where no pixels should be visible (transparent pixels).

    Canvas doesn't work if using z-depth.

    Sprites will sometimes refuse to render when using z-depth on them and appearing on a 3D layer or above it, and sometimes will work. Other times they'll work on regular layers above 3D layers, sometimes they don't. But when they do, obviously there's no sorting in those cases and clipping occurs.

    Yes I have had layers set as 3D and not 3D, I've sacrificed goats, deflowered virgins and wiped out entire Amazonian tribes, but none of them have helped.

    I know I can fake most of what I'm doing (at the expense of huge amounts of VRAM). But it would be nice to be able to do it properly, or at least know how to get these tools to work correctly.

    Can anyone help?

  • Well... I wanted to look at the cap, but every time I try to I get an "Abnormal program termination" in construct.exe. I can open up construct just fine; the cap is just wonky.

    Are you using the latest version? The one on the forum not the main site.

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  • Lost my Keys,

    Yes you are right. I want encrypted pictures not compressed, My bad.

    That feature would make Construct much more powerful since your games could be vastly larger with less bulk.

    That said, is there a tutorial to load in a renamed .zip or .rar?

    Low level security is better than none *smile*

    Don't think you need to do anything special with the renamed zip. I haven't tried it, but I've loaded other files that I renamed to random extensions and they ran perfectly fine, and zips are often used in other games but simply renamed to something else, so should be ok (in theory).

    I asked David (one of the devs) about it, and he didn't think it would be added to C1. But that wouldn't rule it out for C2 I guess, so if enough people want it, it'll probably be done for that.

    For the time being though, you should be just fine keeping the artwork inside the executable. The audio on the other hand, that is kept externally. But yeah renaming the extensions there should keep some people out.

    There's a plugin called 's' available which can do encryption but I can't say if it'll be of any use in this case, you'd have to look into that as I've never used 's' myself.

  • This just happened to my friend, heres a print :

    <img src="http://1154988038932521664-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/usonic/Image.jpg">

    the .exe works fine here, but not on my friends PC..

    her system is Vista home basic, 32bits.

    Also using the last build of Construct, 0.99.62

    Latest build is 0.99.72 (it's an unstable build, but it's no less stable than 62) Can be found on the forum in announcements, don't know if it'll fix the problem though.

  • So sorry, let me explain better. I understand that media loaded in to Construct is now compressed in to the program and untouchable. But I once made a game where there was lots of sounds and large pictures, so I kept them external and loaded them as needed. Here is what I did:

    I wrote an adventure game where there were dozens of rooms with 600 x 800 picture backgrounds and mp3 voice and sound files. Keeping them all embedded in the program would bloat the game. So I loaded each as needed. But there is no reason for a player to finish the game if they can just browse the picture and sound folder.

    Along those lines I also played a fun game that awarded pictures as a prize for completing a level. Again there were like 50 pictures to collect. You would not want the players to just look in the directory to see them. But force them to play to get the next prize.

    In conclusion my request was for a way to compress media (maybe into one file) and then have construct be able to read it.

    Your artwork should be power of 2 sizes (split and tile if you have to). Artwork is rounded up to the next largest size, and a collection of smaller ones is going to be easier on the system than fewer large ones.

    You can load textures etc. per layout rather than on application start. With dozens of 600x800 images it's not surprising it bogged things down. So per layout, it would just load what it needs for that one, then dump it once it moves onto the next.

    You're wanting an encrypted archive/pack, rather than a compressed one. It's been asked for before a few times (I'd like it too!), in the hopes of keeping the executable small (for easy patching/updates at a later date), but I don't know what the official stance is on that.

    Or you could use the zip object and just rename it to .dat or something and that might keep the majority from looking too closely. It wont keep everyone out, but then if someone is going to go sniffing around, they'll get into anything and crack any protection.

  • There really is no other way to screenshot, huh?

    Kan

    Print Screen?

    Canvas should be working as advertised now, if not you should post a bug on the tracker and someone will take a look at it.

  • I think you need to definitely install the August 2008 DirectX 9c parts too (should come with construct).

  • Hahaha, that's awesome!

  • Congrats!

  • Awesome! Nice one!

  • since its like several gigabytes big.

    You're thinking of the Windows mouse driver

  • > <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/perpixelightingscreenshot.PNG">

    > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/light3.exe

    >

    This is quite awesome!

    although the amount of setup for it to work scares me a bit... waiting for .cap and effect files!

    From what I can gather (and David will have to confirm if this is right or wrong for the shader, I'm mostly guessing) you do the following.

    Create your scene, object or whatever you're wanting to use it on.

    <img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/realcolor.png">

    Make a gradient that goes from the bottom (black) to the top (white) of the model. Don't use the depth map or zbuffer or whatever it's called in your program of choice.

    <img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/realdepth.png">

    Make a normal version using tangent space (the original videos say world space, but the appearance is that of a tangent/texture space normal map). Max users say this is done via render to texture, Softimage and Maya probably has a buffer it can output in this format, Lightwave needs some extra plugins since it uses tangent but can only natively output world space, lol.

    <img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/realnormal.png">

    From there you need to place the height map in the normal map, so the highest area's are transparent (white) and the lowest area's 100% opaque (black).

    Go back into construct, load your full rendered image, and the normal+height image, place that over the rendered one and apply the effect.

  • <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/perpixelightingscreenshot.PNG">

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/light3.exe

    Had a go at making a shader which is a modification of the bump map shader (one that supports an alpha channel that represents the heightmap). Its hell tricky to use though. Basically you need to determine how high white is to be able to get the pixels. Oh and making 3dsmax or whatever your using rendering everything correctly is also a headache...

    Anyway I understand the technique...its just getting the shader perfected.

    Holy.. Damn! Works great too! I gotta find excuses to use this now

    Yep haha. Also just wrote a shader for ambient occlusion for lucid

    edit: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030 ... l_03.shtml

    aha!

    Haha, I saw that in chat (just woke up, sorry I suddenly got so quiet earlier lol), guess lucid spotted madster and I's SSAO discussion on the forum, I posted that page he showed you when I was trying to prove it could be done and was being an ass and not giving up, hehe.

  • Great now I cant get into chat

    Hey LostMyKeys I've worked out how to make the normal map and stuff in 3dsmax. The only thing I dont know how to do is the heightmap. Was it done with a fog going upwards or something?

    Cool cause I apparently suck suddenly lol. I could not for the life of me get the correct normal map to come out. The Photoshop version SHOULD have given the exact same result as the example. But instead it's coming out with shit lol. And the 3D method seems to only give correct results in world based normal maps instead of tangent. I'm playing around with lighting, and if I put the lights in the right place to simulate it, that would work in the end.

    The height map I just used a gradient across the whole model stretched from top to bottom. Fog and the real depth maps wouldn't work in this case (unless max's fog isn't tied to the angle of the camera?)

    Edit: And I think there's something up with mibbit, keeps dropping people.