lucid's Forum Posts

  • you're right.

    I tried several things to stabilize the physics at low framerates, and nothing seems to do the trick. in general, I think at this point physics can only be used for cool effects. It would be a bad idea to make a physics based game. There's alot of glitchy things about physics. I use it alot to make things look cool, but I wouldn't be trying to make the next 'world of goo' with it.

  • I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing (see image)

  • if you use the close X (not the main program one) to close your program, it doesn't ask if you want to save changes. Then when you totally shut down construct it asks you. if you loaded more than one project, it's difficult to tell or remember which project it's talking about. Also, since it's not standard windows app behavior, it may be confusing to users who may not realize it's asking about the changes for a child window no longer visible or retrievable

  • if I add up the size on disk of every png file I use as a sprite, and I have no effects at all, no canvases, etc. just sprites, is that around how much vram I'll be using, or does it have to convert it at runtime to some other form that takes up more ram. Also, do effects eat up alot of vram? layers? I'm getting ready to move from the experimental phase to creating my first level. Some of the graphical elements will take alot of time to create. I'm planning on having smooth frame by frame animations, and high res textures. Before going through some of the trouble of creating these, I want to have at least a general idea of my limitations

  • thanks mad

    it's food grain quazi

  • demonstration of bumpmapping with a different shape instead of spotlight,

    plus pretty particle effects to boot:

    lightcone

  • ooh!!!!! Nevermind

    figured it out!

    works perfect!

    Thanks, and as a bonus, the canvas makes perfect sense now!!!!

    thanks again dave

  • thanks davi.

    I've never really understood the canvas object, can you post a cap, preferably just an altered version of the one I posted here? if it's not too time consuming or too much trouble. It'd be a big help.

    thanks either way

  • so if no one responds and it's not in the todo list, does that mean it's not gonna happen?

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  • I think it should have a few ways of going about it.

    1. Load everything at start, like it is now. A lot of games are small enough that pretty much any card could load them, and then you don't have any loading issues.

    2. Upon going from one layout to another, dump everything except global objects and load all objects on the new layout into VRAM.

    3. Have a checkbox "keep in VRAM" - like for the main character, who's going to be used often, even if they're not global. Can be overridden by:

    4. Manual controls. Example: At start of layout, dump everything (except the stuff in #3), delete the objects you don't want to use, then use a "load objects in layout" command. Or the "destroy at startup" attribute will prevent an object from being loaded into VRAM.

    There might be a better way of going about it, but those're my thoughts.

    yes, yes, all that

    but the checkbox "keep in VRAM" should be toggle-able at runtime, so you can easily exclude one or two things from the dump, and decide that at each level.

  • damnit, wrote this last night, now I can't edit my post. it was like 3 in the morning, now I see all the hidden features were done by devs

    my bad guys

  • so if I put bumpmapping on a sprite, at runtime I can change lightx and lighty

    if I put bumpmapping on a layer, I cannot change lightx and lighty at runtime.

  • I don't know if I'm authorized to write one of these, but this one has proved extremely useful to me time and time again, and I haven't seen it documented. very nice time saver

    in many situations where you think you'd have to copy and paste and expression or start from scratch to do something slightly different, construct's smart back button comes in handy.

    Let's say you have a condition where if the x coordinate of sprite0 is greater than some complex expression, you take a certain action. Oops. Maybe you really should've tried this with sprite1 instead. You don't have to redo the whole thing with sprite1. Go into your original condition, and click back repeatedly until you can choose a different object. choose sprite1, and choose your the x coordinate condition again, and your complex expression will still be there. Did you mean to use the ycoordinate instead, click back and choose that condition. Even though it's a different condition, it will have your original expression where you'd expect it to be.

    This works for much more complex situations as well. Suppose you had made a normalmapped sprite and you had the infamous lightsourcing expression "(MouseX - Sprite.X) / Sprite.Width" set for lightx. Now you realize you really wanted to use a heightmap instead. You don't need to copy and paste the lightsource expression or start from scratch. Add your heightmap effect before you delete the normal map, and then go into your normalmap:set lightx action, and hit the back button until you can choose heightmap instead of the normalmap. you'll notice that lightx is already selected for you under the new heightmap tab. press the next button repeatedly, and you'll see it's all filled out for you already.

    The back button has this memorization feature in almost any situation you can think of that'd be annoying to redo, so try it out before you take the time to start an expression or condition from scratch. If you happen to stumble upon a situation where it doesn't work, you don't have to fear losing your brilliant expressions. Hit the cancel button, and everythings back to where you left it.

  • mask and erase seem to be the same things but inverse of eachother. it would be helpful if I could mask the whole layer, and then use a small sprite to cut a whole and see a little circle cutout of the layer. or the reverse for erase

    as of now if you want to do this you need to make a mask that takes up the whole view, with your actual mask shape in the middle. and if you want to be able to move it, the mask has to take up more than the view.

    there should be a checkbox on the layer or on the mask effect, that allows you to start with the whole thing masked and then your mask sprite could cut a whole in that.

    an example of the problem I'm trying to solve is in the cap below.

    the idea is to only see the circle of pink stuff revealed, but if you move the mouse around you can easily ruin the effect.

    problem.cap

    on a side note, it'd be cool if you could toggle the behavior of overlapping masks to go more transparent or less so. as of now if I put two masks over eachother, it goes by whichever is more transparent. it'd be convenient to be able to trigger the opposite behavior, or an average. it's also not possible to combine erase and mask to fix either problem.

  • so if I put bumpmapping on a sprite, at runtime I can change lightx and lighty

    if I put bumpmapping on a layer, is there a way I can change lightx and lighty at runtime?