ome6a1717's Forum Posts

  • Rory - very nice. It looks like a great game. However when I first saw it, my first thought was that it wasn't pixel art (obviously, it is!) But it's quite high resolution pixel art. I think the effect would be much more noticable if you were do a game that was in a 320 x 180 resolution.

    Just as a test, I'm learning the basics of GML in gamemaker studio 2 to recreate the exact thing I'm doing in c3 to see if I get hit with the same problems.

  • newt - ahh I wonder if hyper light drifter and titan souls did the same thing.

    Rory - yeah I’m not entirely sure that’s the best work around. You shouldn’t need to do something like that.

  • mOOnpunk - Either that, or they somehow have more control over the resolution/scaling settings.

    Part of the problem is that I absolutely LOVE construct's workflow, but I'm so afraid to release a game with it and see people complaining about the things I can't change (which has already happened twice).

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  • Rory - thats the problem. Everyone has tried to solve it, but no one has a solution. The most obvious one would be to use scale outer and then adjust the UI and other things as necessary, but I'm not sure how viable that is because I don't think it does an integer scale (and you could technically make the window super wide to see the entire layout).

    I just opened Dead Cells to see how the game looked. I noticed something interesting; the game itself is a stylized pixel game. But there are some high-res art pieces in there as well, which makes me think they're somehow scaling the game to a large resolution. And also the camera movement is as smooth as butter. No jerkiness, no distorted pixels.

    I'm at a loss!

  • Im not real clear on what you mean by squished. Moving a camera is either smooth, or jittery.

    You have most of the basic formula there, but the dt is a bit concerning.

    lerp(scrollx,target.x,speed*dt)

    lerp(scrolly,target.y,speed*dt)

    Where speed is in pixels per second.

    Now if you don't like the easing, you might try one of the other expressions like cosp(), but keep in mind you would have to change the speed.

    Honestly the more I research it, I believe it's due to the fact that I'm using Letterbox Scale instead of Letterbox Scale Integer. The problems go away, I just have to figure out a way to deal with the black bars which I'm not sure is possible in C3.

    What is concerning to you about dt? I think it's necessary depending on the framerate of the game to include it.

    Interesting about cosp(); I didn't know that was a thing. I'll try it out, thanks!

  • You would need to be a bit more specific, but keep in mind there's little gotchas when moving in pixel space, just as there is drawing in it. Like rotations, odd diagonals, overlapping textures etc.

    Right, I know not to rotate and do things like that.

    Basically the main thing I'm struggling with is coding the camera: 

    SET CAMERA POSITION TO:

lerp(camerax, playerx, dt)
lerp(camaeray, playery, dt)

    This is my usual go to for camera movement (with more advanced alterations here or there), but the pixels constantly get squished and go back to full size unless pixel rounding is on. If it IS on, then the camera stutters as it moves (because it's only moving in integers). Obviously I can just do set position playerx and y, but it's not as nice as moving the camera towards the player, and especially things like "dash" mechanics get tricky if the camera is stuck up your behind that closely.

  • There's a setting called pixel rounding. You can guess what it does.

    You don't have to use it.

    Then again there's no reason the camera should be stuck to rounded xy's.

    You might want to check out various ways to manipulate the scrollx, and scrolly properties.

    You will absolutely want to turn off rendering interpolation. That will ensure upscaling looks good when upscaled to larger dimensions.

    newt - I know what pixel rounding does. And I know I don't have to use it. However, if you turn it off, you get awkward squished pixels as the camera moves (unless you're full screen at the correct aspect ratio, in which case you just get screen tearing).

    Tokinsom - I was just thinking lerping the camera would be smoother if the resolution was higher but still with pixel rounding on. Like I said, it's just an experiment at the moment. With all of the indie pixel art games that look and feel gorgeous out there, I'm wondering if this is only possible with a native engine instead of HTML5?

    I currently have high full screen quality; its not that quality I'm worried about. It's basically what you're saying about trying to avoid seeing "sub pixels". Is that what other companies do and I'm just not noticing the pixel distortion?

  • Any takers? I'm starting to second guess my approach and I don't want to develop too far before I realize what I'm doing is a mistake :)

  • Pixel art has always been a trend with indie developers because it’s easy to learn, doesn’t require a lot of cpu or gpu power, and can look great.

    I wanted to bring up a question that I’ve been thinking about for a while. A lot of newer, more modern indie pixel art games feel very fluid, almost as things move at a float pixel rate instead of a 1x1 pixel.

    Anyone who has tried to make this type of game has run into “why does my camera jitter” or “why does every look like it’s stuttering when moving on screen”. Do developers draw their pixel art at, say 640x360 and then scale everything up to 4-8x in game? Or are we missing a trick somewhere? Is it a bad idea to do something like that?

    I’m currently trying it with varying degrees of success. Things like tilemaps, unfortunately can’t be scaled, so they need to be brought in at 4x increasing memory. However it’s still heaps less than it would be if it were a high-res game.

    So my question is, how do games like hyper light drifter or titan souls look like pixel art but REACT like high Rez?

  • I’ve actually had this happening more frequently as well. There was a debug error in chrome I received about the jump through behavior.

    EDIT: Image attached.

  • Great suggestion! It ended up working; incredibly annoying but at least nothing has to be redesigned :)

    Thank you!

  • — the reason I know it’s not catching is because to test it I put Browser:Close as the action on each one. Only one of them was triggering. Maybe I’ll try your suggestion and have them done in sequence.

    Still seems strange to me you couldn’t check simultaneously.

  • I wonder if "on item exists" is a trigger and can only be triggered once per tick, and all 3 are being triggered simultaneously?

  • —

  • I'm using the save feature for saving the whole game, but there are some aspects that I would like to override, and for that I'm using Local Storage (being control settings, unlocks, etc.).

    I'm trying to use get item for 3 individual keys simultaneously, but it seems only 1 loads correctly. If I disable 2 of them, then the 3rd will load correctly (no matter what the selection is), but if all 3 are enabled seemingly only 1 of them gets loaded.

    Am I using it wrong? Can I not use it this way? I want to basically be able to save the options.asjson (dictionary), an unlock.asjson (dictionary), and loadable.asjson (check if you can continue from a saved game), so it wouldn't make sense to group these all into 1 dictionary.

    Thanks in advance...