Nhdeitmers's Forum Posts

  • Can someone explain why I'm getting different results when swiping on this object? I would expect it to always move the same distance, but it varies quite a bit?

  • First of all let me say that this is a really early impression I would like to share, maybe getting some feedback or tips in return.

    My observations might be based on the fact that I did not quite wrap my head around the ins and outs of timelines yet, or I might be spoiled by more advanced software that has been around for a lot longer than Construct.

    That being said:

    At first I was puzzled by the key frame selection tool. I'm used to being able to select keys by default in most track views and it always worked well for me. Using the selection and moving some frames to a new position I'm missing visual feedback. It would be nice to see the frames markers move with the mouse like in any other software I've used, instead of just the marker with two lables for absolute and relative offset.

    To me arranging keys and finding the right timing is a visual process, where I need to see how the keys align with other keys. Especially when things get more complex this is quite essential imho.

    Another nice feature I miss are selection ranges. When animating it happens a lot that you are happy with a rhythm you created, but the object animates too slow compared to other objects in the same timeline. Being able to select all keys and drag the ends of that selection range to scale the selected keys in time would be great.

    When in edit mode I would expect to be able to select multiple objects, modify them and set keyframes for all of them.

    Instead only one of two objects gets keyed and the other jumps back into place so I loose my edit. Why do I have to select and key the objects one by one?

    The zoom options are nice but apparently I can't zoom out any more than 1x, which shows 18 seconds of animation, probably OK for many applications, but why not make the zoom more flexible. My favorite solution for this is using the mouse wheel plus Ctrl or Alt to zoom in and out.

    Maybe that's me being used to more modern 3D Software interfaces like 3DS Max or Maya or engines like Unity, and I don't know about the technicalities behind the interface, but in my experience animation editors can be more intuitive and when they are they are even more powerful tools :)

    I had to work with Flash professionally for a couple of years and eventually got the hang of using the timelines there, but to me they felt outdated even at the time. So I would be really happy if this aspect of Construct would evolve towards a more visual and more intuitive interface like Unity has...

  • Hi Veterans :)

    I've been going over the next step in my project trying to come up with an approach in theory first, to think about implications and potential of different approaches.

    I would appreciate your opinions on how to do this best, by which I mean simple but flexible and easy to work with going forward.

    The goal is this:

    I have a guitar fretboard with 12 x 6 possible notes that will pop up during the game. I'm planning to document the reaction times the player needs to answer the correct names, not only for every single note but for five distinctive regions that overlap horizontally, meaning some notes belong to two regions and will have two reaction times based on context.

    In the long run I would like to append all reaction times and create statistics from that, which can be filtered by day/week/month etc..

    My idea in each scenario is to create a big sprite for the actual fretboard and in top create text fields for the note names with instance variables that store an index, that I can use to read and write from arrays later on.

    Now I'm considering 2 approaches:

    1) 5 2D arrays for the different positions and 5 overlapping fields of sprites. (oredered horizontally, then vertically)

    In this case the arrays would store

    X: times

    Y: note names

    2) 1 3D array with the third dimension representing the positions

    In this case the arrays would store

    X: times

    Y: note names

    Z: the above for each position

    I'm leaning towards the 3D array because I feel it's more logical to only have the actual number of note instances and only one array to deal with. On the other hand I've never before worked with 3D arrays and don't know the implications.

    Is there anything you can recommend based on this information? And I guess my first question would be: Is any array actually a good way to store that amount of data in the first place, or how do you usually handle saving data like that for more than one session?

    Thanks for bearing with me here! :)

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  • Thanks, eleanorjmorel! I was looking for actual font spacing in text objects. Like you have it in Photoshop or any serious graphics app...

  • How would you make a transition for a group of objects or even a complete screen?

    Let's say whenever you go to the main menu or to the options you want to have a screen transition like a "coin flip" (The screen scales from 100 to 0 in one dimension only, changes visually and the next version of it scales from 0 to 100, giving the impression of a fake rotation)

    From what I read so far I think the time line would be a way to animate things, but how would I organize my instances in the layout to remain flexible, add more content and still be able to keep the same transition?

    Does it make sense to make a screenshot and use that for the scaling instead?

  • I didn't find any mention of kerning or any way to set the distance between font letters, but it would be great to be able to set it, escpecially for menus it is quite useful!

  • Thank you, dop2000! That works great.

  • Thank you! How cool is that. I thought I tried that, but was probably too hung up on the idea that it would have to be the Alt button, haha...

  • drive.google.com/file/d/1UkX5nqXjcZzS7pziSWdyE-6KLsI5kB-F/view

    Hey guys! I created a swipe menu system that I would like your feedback on and I still need help with a little fix.

    The menu works in a way that it takes the initial position and width of a certain sprite object, that will be used as a drag and drop enabled parent to slide all menu items at the same time.

    The menu items text is derived from an instance variable containing a string with all the names ("item1","item2","item3")

    On start layout the parent oject spawns all menu items and a set of actions is used to control the movement and wrapping of the menu items.

    The one thing that is broken right now is the case when I do two fast swipes to the right. This will create a gap in the menu, which fixes itself after one more swipe, but I would still like to understand what's going on.

    In general this is my first attempt to build something of this sort, so feel free to suggest any improvements and give me your honest opinion. :-)

  • On start layout I want to execute a loop for each of two (or more) existing instances of a text object that each represent a swipe menu.

    This loop starts a second loop with an index, creating the menu items, which are simply more instances of the same objects in a horizontal row right next to where the existing ones are.

    Everything seems to work up to the point where I need the newly created objects to get their names from an instance variable "Items" containing a string. This string is a list of all the items and different of course for each of the pre existing objects, but for some reason all created objects reference the instance variable of the same object, and I can't figure out how to specifically look at each object in the layout and based on that instance's variable "items" create a row of new objects that derive their number and text from that variable.

    I'm having a really hard time understanding the flow of information and picking, even though i keep reading the manual section about how events work over and over.. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

  • Working great, thank you!

  • I guess I was thinking inside the box too much. I was trying to compare the string from the menu item and try to find out if the other object's family name would match.

    Instead I can just go the other way around and make the family members look at compare the string of the menu.

    Creat by name might be just what i need in the next step, to spawn the notes.

    Thanks!

  • Thank you AllanR! I was missing the loopIndex keyword. That's just what I was looking for.

  • Ah, that's an interesting solution. For now I put it on a layer set to "not initially show", which seems to ignore actions.

    But I might use your suggestion when the project gets bigger.

    Thanks! :-)

  • Thanks! I am using comments. But they also don't allow line breaks, do they? for release notes I would need that.