Lost my Keys's Forum Posts

  • Could you not just build a simple scene in a regular 3D package, render it out, put it together as a video file, and then play it using the avi object in your background layer?

    Ok, tried doing that. Unfortunately the avi object overlays everything else, and also includes a control, so it's no use for something like this.

    I did try just a regular sprite with all the frames and played that in the background to demonstrate how it could look

    *

    but doing it that way, you're going to end up with an insanely large exe file, which is a shame, cause I'm guessing this is exactly what you're wanting, and would otherwise have worked perfectly.

    What would be great would be an addition to the avi object to stop it overlaying everything, and the option to remove it's controls. Allowing it to be placed in any layer, so it can be used for cases like this where a complex animated background is required.

  • I shall download this before it is consumed by the mediafire.

    Okay. That is pretty clever. I don't think there's a need to do a shader for that, it works perfectly.

    Although if you can think of a reason for making one (like some kind of flexibility), I could do it.

    Hm. Zelda 3. So cool. Now just layer a fog gradient on top <3

    Glad you like it

    I suppose a proper pixel shader to do this could maybe have options for how distorted the effect is and using the same method this does where any value above black in the gradient/image used is effected by it. Then rather than having to stretch and line it up across the layout (which can become a little problematic as you can't scroll too far off to the side of the layout right now) that could be done by values in the effect.

    I suppose then too, that would allow the effect to be controlled via events? Which is bound to be useful to somebody. I suppose one idea would be a shoot-em-up, where you get a power-up to go faster, using it does the usual increase in movement speed and scrolling, but also could increase this effect a little, kinda like some sort of warp factor 8 hehe.

    I suppose another use for it, with controllable values.. Lets use the Zelda example, with the slightly off top down graphical approach. Now what if your 2D world had more than one level, say you could go up some steps to a level a little higher up. You could have the effect change the amount of distortion at the same time, say.. the higher up your character is supposed to be, the less it's distorted. It wouldn't actually add anything to gameplay, but as a little visual effect it could be kinda cool.

    I should be slapped for saying I suppose too many times.

  • Cool, It's an easy mode 7ish effect.

    Thanks, I thought so too Course, someone who has experience making pixel shaders could I would think, create one that does this sort of thing, but properly. Though it's usefulness diminishes at more extreme angles.

    This would work great as-is laid over a verticle shmup or racing game.

    Nice effect

    Oooh yeah! That could look really cool

    Thanks

    P.S. I've no idea how this would work out using something like the 3D Box. As I'm not one of those who want to turn construct into a 3D engine. But I suppose it could work ok.

  • I don't know if this is of any use to anybody. If it's already been mentioned then sorry! The effect is pretty subtle, but it might have its uses in some cases.

    Download link

    http://www.box.net/shared/svu919182h

    [edited by: deadeye]

    What it does

    Gives the screen a kind of perspective appearance. You can fiddle around with it to increase the amount and by stretching and moving the gradient you can almost get a kind of isometric like look (but your artwork will have to be made with that in mind, and it wont be true iso, more a kind of weird semi perspective sort.. or something heh). Naturally it wont work for everything, and your artwork might have to be drawn with it in mind to make better use of it. But it should work in most cases as an added touch. Because it sits in its own layer and doesn't effect your game map, you shouldn't have to worry about it effecting the actual game layout. It's just a regular stock effect and doesn't use anything that isn't already in the program out of the box. Course you could always change the gradient entirely, to cause all kinds of strangeness too.

    You can't push it too far or things get really distorted, and no, it doesn't turn construct into a 3D engine either

    Could work well with games like Zelda or Chaos Engine. Or put behind game layers, yet in front of background scrolling animation to give a curious style to regular parallax effects.

    So err yeah, hope someone finds it useful

  • Nice work! If this trick works consistently, I could think of a lot of times I might want to use it.

    I just wanted to add that it didn't blur for me, it looked just how it should, with nice crisp clean edges. I have an nVidia card if that's of any help (if the kind of card makes a difference to the blur/no blur thing people are getting).

    Also it says it doesn't work well with captions turned on. I of course felt the need to try that, and it still worked fine for me. Maybe something the devs did in an update, fixed it?

  • Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with how RMXP works. I should use tilesets, but my team has err chosen to have Breath of Fire 4 as our tilesets, which we only get by print screening game plays . It will be a bother to redo everything in that map though, So i guess I'll just remove the large objects of the towns and replace it with a new one which will be smaller objects.

    About the travelling thing, my rpg will most likely be like Harvest Moon where the whole game only focuses on 1 town. So probably 3 to 4 maps in 1 layout shouldnt be bad, but if it would, then we'll do what you said.

    BTW, how do I do the shading part in our map? The one at every side, where it would fade to black. Can construct do that?

    A very quick and simple example

    *

    and that's not even done properly using proper tiles or anything, but it works, it's a big map (big enough for most things I would imagine), and it's only 1.6mb. The shadows are all on another layer, above where the players would be, so it creates a believable shadow over them. While the tree tops are on the highest layer, so you can walk under them. There are also invisible collision boxes at the center of each tree, so you can't walk where the trunks are... Ok those aren't everywhere, I forgot to copy/paste them onto other tree's when I increased the map size even greater, my bad. But yeah, you should get the general idea. I should also point out that I'm not even remotely near constructs max layout size limit with this map either. Just think, if you did as others suggest, and use tiles. You could theoretically make a game world many times bigger than you're making right now, and it probably still wouldn't hit 27mb in file size.

    Now, if I wanted to. I could make that map feel four or five times larger using various tricks, without increasing the layout size.

    1) Large maps don't mean you should be able to go from point A to point B directly, make them travel certain routes. Morrowind was a good example, that game is surprisingly small, yet when playing it without flying cheats or spells, it feels large because you have to follow certain directions to get to places, pass around mountains and so on. Yet one town is just a few minutes from another if you went to it directly. Just about every game ever made has used this trick, made the most of every inch. So include obstacles, some impassable hills between one area and another, forcing the player to go around, which might lead them into new adventures at the same time.

    2) Slow down the movement of the characters, that will instantly make a map feel larger. Start adding vehicles, mounts, ships, and the world gets smaller.

    3) Make all characters smaller. Imagine instead of that red X, it was an 8x8px Lemming and everything was done to it's scale. The map would be on a par with the size of London Imagine an Ant. To the Ant, your house is the size of your town, your town is the size of a small continent to the Ant. Scale makes a big difference.

    4) Lots of distractions. If there's plenty to do for a player as they travel along, they can become distracted doing something else, thus making their journey from one point to another, take longer. It also helps avoid the thing becoming boring (how often can you wander through World of Warcraft without becoming bored) and remember, your game will be single player, so nobody else to turn up out of the blue with things to do. But don't stick in enemies every few steps, cause fighting allll the time is boring as well.

    And how do you expect to use BoF4 graphics, anyway? BoF4 is in 3D... it doesn't use tiles. It's rather ridiculous to expect that you can just screenshot a 3D game and cut out the pieces you need. You're not saving yourself any time by doing that, because it won't work and you'll eventually have to start over from scratch and do it the proper way.

    Plus, it's stealing.

  • Thank you for your ideas and interest. However viruses are too tiny for a game that pretends to be realistic, bacterias would be hard to see too. Protozoan and metazoan parasites are bigger and more diverse, they have more definite path through the body before they start multiplicating, they also have different development phases.

    Some scary images:

    -Protozoons

    -Metazoons

    Duodenale and Duodenale's revenge

    <img src="http://www.nematode.net/IMAGES/duodenale.jpg">

    That's a game character just begging to be made!

  • http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html

    A diary of the creation of the C64 game 'Paradroid'.

    Since most on here are working alone in bedrooms like the good old days, as opposed to large groups like those mod teams rushing to work on whatever the latest 3D game engine happens to be at the time before giving up and going onto the next one. I thought some of you might find this interesting (mainly the older ones in a nostalgic way), but also for the younger ones, who might not even have been born at the time when this particular game was made.

    Personally I found the similarities to the problems, issues, flashes of genius and frustration from back then and these days, pretty amusing. We might have it soo much easier now, but still have practically the same issues.

    Some of it is pretty amusing, a lot of it will probably have you nodding or rolling your eyes in painful understanding.

  • > I was thinking about something related to the trip of a parasite through the body, but with a realistic look.

    >

    How about a game where you start off by choosing which virus you want to play as, and then fight through the bodies' immune system to infect the human?

    CONGRATULATIONS...

    You have have given your host body;

    AIDS!

    Errr... or maybe not.

    Got my vote. In this day and age of not even being able to sing Bah Bah Blacksheep to your newborn without being called a racist. I think a politically incorrect game like that would be perfect! No problem finding idea's for sequels either, Swine Flu, flesh eating bacteria etc.

    I'd play it.

    the OP, looks great!

  • Agreed with the others, you don't need huge tiles. Take a leaf out of 3D Engine books if it helps (because I get the impression when tiles are mentioned, a lot of people automatically think "eiw square looking maps!"), anyway a lot of those are made up from small parts, and other small parts to make them unique. So for example you could have a tile representing a piece of road. Then a bunch of artwork representing details you might have on that road, puddles, rocks, grates, etc. and so on. So using just those you can repeat the same piece of road, but when it's done it wont be obviously repeated, and reuse the details (or decals if you want to call them that) elsewhere too. I dunno, but surely that would cut down a lot of resources and allow them to be used in more situations than straight tile setup would.

    Along with deadeyes suggestion for the tree tops. You could also use that sprite frame trick I think I found on youtube. Setting the animation speed to zero and then just changing the start frame to various frames. In the trees case, each frame could be a different tree top. You could change each tree manually, or I suppose it's possible to do it randomly, so all you'd do is place your tree's and each time it runs it might change which uses which frames, giving some randomness to the look of things. I dunno if doing it that way would make any difference speed/size wise, but it's another option at least.

    Also bear in mind Construct creates DX games, which means it will have to follow the rules of the video cards, which means huge tiles such as the ones you've been using are possibly being rounded up into even higher tile sizes internally, and only the very recent video cards can happily cope with those. It's possible that's why many are crashing trying to use it, because their cards can't handle those sizes. If you want more people to be able to play your game, I'd not go over 256x256 max for your tiles, sprites etc. to be really safe.

  • I think someone should make a Ghost Shooter clone on it.

  • 1. Get dropbox, because I can't download the cap from your file host. And, dropbox is the the best hosting solution on the internet.

    [quote:2gxiz042]The second problem is no matter what size or resolution I make the canvas, it seems to want to remove a whole chunk of it from off-screen. As you'll see in the cap, it should reach to the end, but it doesn't. This isn't noticeable if it's all on the same screen or there's no scrolling used, but if it can only work in a single visible screen, that greatly limits usefulness.

    So yeah, anyone got any ideas or fixes? It almost works perfectly, but these two issues make it entirely unusable doing it this way.

    I've checked out the one here viewtopic.php?f=16&t=971 where I got the idea from. Doing it that way with a mouse behavior on the eraser does work, as in it doesn't leave bits of other sprites on the screen. But it too doesn't solve the canvas deleting parts of itself off-screen, or the smearing scrolling effect.

    So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or can suggest a way to fix it, I'd be very grateful.

    This is a bug, which I forgot to post to the tracker... Posting now.

    Yeah, it's still doing the removing parts of the canvas, even if using a few tiles, then randomly just removing a chunk of the canvas even if it's all on screen at once. The first problem, with the hall of mirrors / smearing effect when scrolling, and the left over garbage, both seem to be fixable by adding an always destroy the eraser sprite (along with the one to destroy it once it's spawned by the bullet), so I suppose the always one is just taking care of any that get forgotten.

    If the bug part gets fixed then that'll be awesome!

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  • Hi guys!

    Been using Construct for a few days, and quietly reading many forum posts as I went along. I did plan on my first post being along the lines of "So what's the catch?" and then go on about how great this program is and there must be some catch like it's just a demo and we have to fork out $9000 a month for it or something But I've stumbled across an issue that this time I can't solve myself or from hunting through the wiki or these forum posts, so gushing about how cool the program is, will have to wait.

    I put together this super quick example to demonstrate the problems I'm having with it.

    *

    The plan is to only allow access through the "rock" once it's been cut away. That part isn't a problem, works exactly how it should. Unfortunately there are bits of the weapon and bits of the eraser left hanging around on screen from where the rock has been erased, not only that but then moving through the newly opened area results in a weird hall of mirrors like smearing effect or something. I've tried a number of things, layers, organizing the events different and so on and so forth, but to do it how I'm wanting to do it, it seems to become a bit messy.

    The second problem is no matter what size or resolution I make the canvas, it seems to want to remove a whole chunk of it from off-screen. As you'll see in the cap, it should reach to the end, but it doesn't. This isn't noticeable if it's all on the same screen or there's no scrolling used, but if it can only work in a single visible screen, that greatly limits usefulness.

    So yeah, anyone got any ideas or fixes? It almost works perfectly, but these two issues make it entirely unusable doing it this way.

    I've checked out the one here where I got the idea from. Doing it that way with a mouse behavior on the eraser does work, as in it doesn't leave bits of other sprites on the screen. But it too doesn't solve the canvas deleting parts of itself off-screen, or the smearing scrolling effect.

    So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or can suggest a way to fix it, I'd be very grateful.

    The link again is *

    I'm using the latest version of Construct, if that helps.