Mort's Forum Posts

  • Hey everyone,

    I've been working on an isometric engine for my game. It's been an absolute blast! Construct 2 is even better than Classic. :)

    Because I haven't seen the challenges of an isometric engine addressed before in the forums, I thought I would share what I have so far. The events are reasonably well commented - anyone who wants to use or adapt the engine is welcome.

    Here is the capx:

    dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct%202/iso%20engine.capx

    Image:

    <img src="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct%202/example.png" border="0" />

    Notable features:

    • uses layers for z-sort
    • can save and load levels using JSON files
    • terrain tiles have distinct coordinates in 3 dimensions
    • terrain borders draw automatically (not quite finished, as you can see)

    Hope someone finds this useful! :)

    Cheers,

    Mort

  • Oh, sure.

    I couldn't find the original version, so here's one with some bonus cruft (like water displacement). The events are grouped, though, so you can definitely find the buoyancy stuff.

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/water.cap

  • Unintentionally made another:

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/images/fractal2.jpg">

    Can't find either on Google, though! It's weird, I've definitely seen them before. (It does look like the Koch curve, especially the Cesaro version of it, but not quite...)

    But I finally got the fill tile working, so that's enough fractal-making for now.

  • I was trying to make a tile that would replicate until it filled an area, but I accidentally made a fractal instead!

    I can't remember what this fractal is called, but I've definitely seen it before. Thought it was a pretty cool accident, though. It emerged from these rules:

    • each tile creates new tiles left, right, up and down
    • if two tiles occupy the same spot, both are destroyed

    (If I hadn't screwed up, only ONE tile would be destroyed in the second rule, not both.)

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/images/fractal.jpg">

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/fractal.cap

  • Thanks Quazi! I'll do that.

  • I'd like to make a game with an inbuilt map editor, and I'm trying to decide how to store the level data.

    The example I've seen on the forums is to have the array's X and Y values correspond to positions in a tiled grid, with the identity of the object stored as a string. Like this:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/mapeditor.cap

    ...but that's no good for me, because my world will be large and mostly empty, so the array would end up having an unfeasibly large filesize.

    So I'm thinking of using a one-dimensional array as a list of all the objects in the world, and saving the actual information about objects as comma-separated values inside the array. (For example, if the object with ID 1 is a standard block tile at X 250, Y 300, then the first entry in the array would equal "block, 250, 300".)

    Here's a quick example I made:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construc ... earray.cap

    Does this sound like a sensible approach? I've tested it up to about 1500 objects and it seems to run well - small delay when loading, but acceptable. I'd hate to go ahead with this and find out there's a better way, though.

    (On that note, I'm thinking about trying the same technique with the List Box object, to see if there's any difference in performance.)

  • This is definitely the most stable release on my PC. Thanks a lot, devs!

  • Actually, someone posted a really awesome level editor on the forums a while back... I can't seem to find it by search, but here's the file.

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/mapeditor.cap

    The events are very well commented - should be self-explanatory. (Thanks, whoever made it!)

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  • Thanks, Porlo!

    Re the example: Wow, that's a really complete, straightforward time reversal - I can't imagine it getting much easier than that.

  • Sorry, but where can I find the "S" plug-in? (I didn't have much luck searching for it, since it's a single letter...)

  • Oops, forgot to mention - I used the latest version of Construct to change it, so you might have to update before it will work!

  • That's amazing. I can't believe you did it with so few events!

  • I like the movement engine. It doesn't quite have the feel of N at this stage, but it does feel awesome.

    I used the following conditions:

    • LOS to make sure there's no wall in the way
    • X check to make sure the player is horizontally close to the thwump
    • Y check to make sure the player is below the thwump.

    It's been a while since I've played N, but I think this behaves the right way. (Obviously it doesn't go back up - but I'll leave that one for you!)

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/n-example.cap

    By the way, your LOS behaviour had some strange settings - with sensitivity like that, I don't think it would ever find anything. Also, the thwump itself was set to 'solid', but the LOS was blocked by solid objects, so it was effectively blind.

    I find it's often worth making sure something works by itself (like the LOS check) before trying to get it to do what you want!

  • It's a condition, not an action - so look in the conditions.

  • Weird. I hadn't seen this thread, but I started making random trees the same day it kicked off.

    I was using an approach like the one Quazi was talking about - branches spawn smaller branches until you have a tree (using randomisation at each step).

    Here's the cap:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/noise6.cap

    And EXE, in case you have an older version (I'm on .84, the latest):

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/906550/Construct/noise6.exe

    Press Q to grow the trees by one step. You should probably stop after about 8-12 steps, because the number of branches increases exponentially.

    I haven't gotten foliage working yet. I had something that looked reasonably good, but it's ridiculously resource-intensive (and so I ended up having to paste it into a Canvas object after, which really reduces the amount of stuff like wind effects you could do). A lot of the fractal trees I've seen in 3d actually used a very similar method to make the foliage after the branches were done, so I might try that.

    (If you like how this approach looks and want to use it, I'll see if I can make up a cleaner .cap so you can see how it works - there's a lot of crappy, leftover, and unrelated eventing in the current one.)