NicotineLL's Forum Posts

  • Yes, that's not possible.

    WackyToaster, is this because the official plugins use undocumented features or is it because their code is not publicly available in a plugin-like package?

  • I want to agree with Ashley on something here - working around software limitations is truly something everyone has or will face at some point, and that OK. In fact, it can be quite fun to break the loop and make you think outside the box for a second.

    The game I've worked on for the past 3 years uses exactly 2 additional addons, one of them is Greenworks and the other Bound to Viewport (thank you skymen) can be recreated with events, but I wanted to see what it would feel like to use 3rd party addons, so I keep it in there. I use two JS libraries, one is generating very slick random IDs and the other one was made obsolete with the latest Construct stable release and the addition of Cryptography plugin. That leaves me with a handful of JS lines that I use on a project with 3123/2653/2303 ACE.

    My point being, every time I hit a wall, it wasn't the limitations of the engine that stopped me from continuing further, it was my limited knowledge at the time.

    I'll give a recent example - I'm a huge perfectionist, I can't have something that works somewhat, I need it to work exactly as I want it to. That's why I had a very bad couple of days trying to figure out how to make the player stick to a sticky surface on any given side. The Platform behavior was not playing ball and was messing tons of other conditions, since I have various ways a player or the surface itself can move. My player movement logic alone is 200 events (and that's not including the input method logic). Then I saw the gif of that one guy making his player go up slopes by using elevating platforms and it hit me, instead of trying to mess with the player, I can simply spawn a solid object under it so it seems like it's stuck on that surface, then apply whatever animations I need to make it look like it's stuck when it's actually just sitting on an invisible ground in mid-air. Then when a given action is performed, remove that invisible ground and the player is no longer stuck. That worked perfectly!

    In that regard, I do not support messing with the engine code itself in undocumented ways nor do I think it's necessary. However, I don't see an issue with cloning an official plugin for example, renaming it, adding it to your project and messing with its code that way, and from what you guys are saying, that's not possible? Either way, not for me, but I'm sure many people will benefit from more ways to expand the engine core while at the same time avoiding "development hell" for Scirra.

  • I was going to write a long post, but it seems most of the talking points has been discussed already in this topic. And I agree with most of them! Instead, I'm going to say this: I love Construct, I've been using it for 7+ years and over that time, for me at least, it felt that as the engine was expanding the community was shrinking. Maybe it's because most people here are beginners, maybe it's because when those beginners get more advanced they jump ship, maybe it's the marketing, maybe it's the paywall, I don't know. What I do know is that I want to continue using Construct in the future, so I hope things improve going forward. This is a great opportunity for the Construct team to reassess the situation and act on it.

    PS I will lie if I say that I didn't look at the alternatives thinking the grass was greener over there. Most recently when the Unity fiasco started and what Godot is offering.

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  • Well yes, that is very similar issue with the exception of when it occurs. Mine only happen when moving the mouse, but everything else is the same. My worker is set on auto, tried on both off and on, but it doesn't do much.

    At the very least I know that it's not an issue with my project, but most likely someone f-ed up Chromium again. I wish I could test Firefox so I know for sure, but I really don't have the mental preperation to deal with more browser issues right now. Maybe I'll give it another go to make the hardware acceleration work later this week.

  • Thank you for the input!

    I tried Firefox, but for some reason it refuses to use hardware acceleration for Construct editor. I've tried to tinker with the settings but wasn't successful in fixing that.

    I did however try your suggestion to copy everything into a new project:

    - Started with all objects - no issues

    - Then I added scripts, sounds, fonts and files - no issues

    - Then I added the layouts - no issues

    - Only when I added the event sheets did it start to drop frames again. However the strange thing is it didn't matter whether the layout had event sheets attached to it or not. Same frame drops in Inspect tab like described in my original post. Like what? Why? Nothing is running... I makes no sense to me. The only other thing I can think of is that the Inspector is struggling with all the variables added by the event sheets even though none of them are running/changing/updating. But if it does, then why isn't it struggling all the time, but only when mouse is moving and no mouse button is pressed? Not to mention, what's the difference in having the Inspector docked or undocked, why one is dropping frames and the other doesn't? Such a weird issue.

    I tried on a different computer to rule out hardware issues, but it's the same.

  • For some reason, today, the Inspector started dropping my FPS to 0 when I'm moving my mouse. This happens only when all of these are true:

    • The Inspector is docked
    • The Inspector is on the Inspect tab
    • The preview is not in fullscreen (in fullscreen it drops far less frames)
    • I'm not holding any of the mouse buttons down (especially the left button, if I hold any other mouse button it still drops 20-30 frames).

    It's weird because I opened a backup of my project from 2 years ago and it's doing the same thing, so surely it can't be something I did recently?

    I've only noticed this on my main project and it doesn't appear to happen in other ones.

    What I have tried is restarting my browser, restarting my PC, using different browsers (all of them), updating Construct to the latest stable version, deleting some of my code, deleting all of my code, deleting layers. Deleting all of my event sheets does work to some degree and it only drops to around 100 FPS, but it's still there. Only when I delete all the event sheets and all of the layers does this issue goes away. But that's not helping much. Could it be related to how many resources are given to the browser by the OS? But how would that even be related to whether I'm holding my mouse button down or not?

    The reason I tried many of those things is because I didn't have this issue until today, clearly it's something tied to this project specifically or it might just be because it's fairly large: 

    Layouts: 16
Event sheets: 18
Total number of events: 1883
Total number of conditions: 2095
Total number of actions: 2565
Total lines of JavaScript code: 256
Object types: 208
Families: 8

    I would really appreciate some ideas! Obviously I can't upload my project nor were I successful of reproducing it in a demo project, so it's understandable if nobody can help me directly, but I figured I might as well try...

    One more thing, and quite important at that, should I even care? Sure it's unpleasant for me at times, but after all it doesn't affect the game performance when the debugger is turned off.

    Here's a visual demonstration of what it looks like

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  • I believe Google Play Services is locked to Android isn't it?

    However FireBase seems like exactly what I was thinking and it might just work. The amount of data I need to store and transfer is so miniscule it probably would fall under their free plan unless there are a lot of active users which doesn't seem too pricy even at scale.

    Thank you for that, I'll look into it!

  • The game I've been developing for the past 3 years has a level editor which allows user created levels to be shared between players. I'm close to a point where I'm considering early access (open alpha) and I need to start thinking about how are people actually going to share their levels.

    As of right now, it's super easy to export the level code with a few clicks, shared on a website like pastebin and imported by copy/pasting it inside the editor. That's fine and I'm willing to use this method for now (I mean look a Path of Exile for example, 50% of this game is played outside of the client [joking of course]), but I kind of want to make this process more integrated into the game itself. The game is not locked to a specific platform or launcher so it needs to have its own way of handling this logic.

    These are challenges I see:

    • User authentication (for submissions)
    • Level code and metadata storage
    • Level approval and status
    • Level rating and stats
    • Level filtering (browse and search)

    And with that in mind these are the possible scenarios I see:

    • Integrate everything in-game, submission, searching, voting, etc.
    • Move submission to an online platform outside of the game while having the searching and voting in-game
    • Moving everything to an online platform including submission, searching and voting.
    • Forget about everything and have manual sharing between users (as it is right now) while select few levels can be featured directly in-game and updated regularly with new ones.

    As a front-end developer with limited back-end knowledge I know how this could work and might even be able to code the app myself with some outside (stackoverflow) help.

    Having in mind everything I mentioned above, do you think this is even worth doing? Should I instead opt for the more manual approach, like people sharing levels to me directly and if they are fun enough I can feature them in-game?

    If I go down the automated path do you have any ideas/technology that I might not be aware of that could make this whole process easier? Maybe a third-party solution that can handle authentication, submissions and storage?

  • I have used C3 for a few years at least and its never saved the layout for me...strange.

    i have a super-ultrawide monitor, and usually have a layout on the left half of the screen, and the event sheet on the right.

    Every time i open the app, it has never saved positions.

    I was right there where you are until earlier today, after clearing all the browsing data from construct.net it's been working fine and it's saving. I'm also on a ultra-wide and it's been bugging me that I can't utilize the space efficiently. No more.

  • Okay, so I've been using Construct 3 since it was released and it never saved my layout. Never did I think it was an issue on my end. Checked on a different browser and it works...

    Reset my cookies and it's saving now. It must have been a corrupted cookie or something. Jeez. Thanks!

    I'm putting this warning on both my posts in case someone is still using that type of backup, which you shouldn't by the way.

  • I'm either blind and can't find this option or it simply doesn't exist. All my docked bars simply remove themselves on exit. Surely I can't be the only one who wants to keep the editor UI layout between sessions? Why is this not an option and more importantly - can it be?

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  • I did try that and it does in fact work in this case, however it wont work if the platform is moving faster.

    Here's my understanding of what's going on: the platform bellow is moving faster than the player can offset its Y, so on the first tick the player is jumping which is correct, however on the second tick the moving platform bellow has moved more than the player has jumped, now the player is slightly inside the platform itself so they are considered "landed" and is pushed out of the platform, which is a normal behavior for the Platform plugin.

    Simulate Jump is somehow compensating for that, but the question is how? It can't be a fixed value, it's something else.

  • Jumping from a platform that is moving upwards doesn't seem to work with the Platform behavior when using "Set vector Y" to jump instead of "Simulate Jump", does anybody have any idea why that might be?

    Here's an example: drive.google.com/file/d/1ChH58U-sgJ2cTnivWbZfIQMtIlvFTIeO/view

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  • Anyone who has taken the time to read the docs knows that Sprite Font plugin is faster than Text plugin for displaying fast changing text, however I was shocked to discover how big the difference actually was!

    There were many topic in the forum about it, but I haven't seen a visual representation, so I threw together a quick test demo that anyone can run to see how it performs on their machine: https://www.construct.net/en/free-online-games/text-vs-sprite-font-plugins-30479/play

    Source file: https://downloads.construct.net/uploads/120/30479/06946e1b-ce65-4008-a82c-1b5b5bf24aed/text%20vs%20sprite%20font.c3p

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