Mort's Forum Posts

  • Thanks for the standard deviation! It'll definitely be useful.

    It's interesting working on ideas for a game with a distributed main character. If most of you makes it to the exit, do you continue, or play the few particles stuck or left behind? What if part of you gets split off and starts to develop as a separate entity? Maybe the character you're playing is part of a larger organism that wants you back. This is fun.

  • So that's how it works! I started out trying to do that, but kept getting anomalous results (eg, when something fell into the water, all of the water sprites would gain height, instead of just the relevant one). Judging by your example, I must have been putting the loop condition in the wrong order.

  • I've made water that can combine with physics objects for buoyancy and displacement. Nothing very complicated - objects are pushed upwards based on their individual buoyancy, and the water level rises based on the number and size of objects in the water. Both of these scale for how much of the object is submerged.

    Anyone who wants to use this is most welcome. I just added the water as a part of my game - though if I'd realised how annoying it would be to implement, I probably wouldn't have done it. Construct is bound to get inbuilt physics water sooner or later!

    Still to do:

    • Make scaling more accurate for ellipses (if motivated enough).
    • Slow down objects to simulate water drag (when Get Force is added).

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

    EDIT: Updated link

  • That's a much better method. Thanks Ashley!

  • Thanks for all the positive feedback!

    I will indeed sell this, if it turns out well enough (and I'll definitely send a percentage back to Construct). That's an awfully long way off, though.

    So far, I'm spending a lot of time on the maths (eg, figuring out the mean or median of the swarm to cause clumping). If anyone has any tips on that stuff, I'm all ears - I get the feeling there might be a more elegant way of working. For example, to get the mean X of the swarm, I do a For Each loop on each object, adding each X value to a variable. I increment another variable that so I know when the loop has added up all the objects; using that, I trigger an event that divides the variable containing the X coords by the number of objects. So far, I haven't worked out how to measure dispersion or find the standard deviation.

    Fortunately, I'm living with two engineers at the moment, and they're helping with the physics. I'll post anything we come up with that seems useful. I've almost finished a method of having attraction between physics objects proportional to their distance from each other (which is good for a gravity-like effect). It isn't at all difficult, especially compared to some of the stuff I've seen posted, but maybe it'll do some good for non-maths guys like me.

  • Okay, thanks Ashley! The issue with 120hz monitors wouldn't destroy the fabric of the universe, I think. I'll see how demanding the game ends up being; maybe I won't need TD override after all.

  • Thanks for the feedback!

    I came up with the swarm idea by accident (it started out as smoke in a completely different physics-based game, but the smoke became more fun than the core gameplay). I'm hoping to make a sort of exploration/puzzle game, with an underlying sci-fi plot - I'll put it up when I have a few levels done.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • I'm making a game that uses a lot of small physics objects as a controllable swarm. If the framerate goes down (eg, on older computers), the physics seems to get less accurate, and a lot of things clip through each other. I'm using TimeDelta in events that apply force to the swarm, but that doesn't make much difference.

    If I use override TimeDelta, the game slows down to cope with the load and the physics works perfectly. A bit of slowdown in this type of game won't cause problems or make the game unfair. I don't see any graphics problems so far.

    So... can I use override Timedelta under these circumstances, or will it cause other problems in the long run? I'm willing to sacrifice the ability to scale time.

    Are there any alternative ways to keep the physics accurate?

    Link to .cap: http://www.mediafire.com/?tdzzvpdjjwj