Overboy's Forum Posts

  • Yes the performance does matter a lot.

    And it's not even just a performance issue, as I said it's just impossible to create signals with parameters or passing instances sélection or UID.

    I first opted for a versatile tag-based Self Function's behaviors to be able to achieve the feature I wanted but it was not performant enough because of the "everything is triggered everytime I call any Self Function". As you said Triggers are not very performant in C3, it can get bad pretty fast.

    So now the way I do it is for each Signal I want, I create a specific Real Trigger via the Addon SDK. So I need to manually add a new Trigger Condition such "On Hit Received" to my "Entity" Behavior everytime I need a Signal. It is not modular at all, all the most used Family in my project now have their own custom behaviors with a bunch of hardcoded Real Triggers.

    I don't fire any signal every tick, but some stuff in my game need to happen very often : such as Entity : "On hit Received", "On damage dealt".

    The way I'm doing it now solved all my perf issue but it feels weird I need to create new Trigger condition via Addon SDK everytime. Also it took me a while to find this hacks way of doing things after rewriting my whole logic from scratch a bunch of times

  • But if you have 20 different signals in your game with 2 different listener (very low number for a big project), it would trigger 40 places in the Eventsheet each time you call any trigger because of the limitation I explained. Not performant at all.

    Also the issue I pointed out is that you can't pass any parameters, so you can't do anything per instance as Custom Actions are doing but with this signals, you can't pass a UID or the current SOL of that Object type.

    This is too limited and not performant at all. I wrote very detailed posts about that multiple time in the past, current On Signals doesn't solve the issue at all

  • > Ashley do you think there is a chance that one day the Addon SDK would supports new "function-like True Triggers" for Timers or any plugin/behavior that wants to implement some kind of "Self-Functions" ?

    The triggers system is not designed to be used for performance-sensitive cases. Basically it's quite slow, but for things like input events, that doesn't matter. The built-in functions are specifically designed to be used in performance-sensitive cases, but they are deeply integrated in to the event engine and so aren't easily extendable. So I'd say if you really need maximum performance, use the built-in functions, but as I was saying before, probably the vast majority of cases don't need extreme performance, so some other solution is probably usually fine anyway.

    Yeah I know existing "Real Trigger" aren't performant enough to handle Trigger events such as On Timer X or On Self Function X where X is a specific tag as it would trigger all the events for every tag every time any timer or any self function is called just to check in each event block if they match the right tag.

    This is why I wonder if it wouldn't be cool to bring the power/efficency of Functions/Custom Actions to the Addon SDK as a new Trigger type in addition to Real Trigger and Fake Trigger let's call them "Signal Trigger".

    I know it wouldn't work exactly as built-in Function as they would need to be on an active group/Eventsheet but as they would not allow any expression to be their "name" or "tag", C3 could map them more efficiently and so they would be more efficient than existing Real Triggers .

    It would only need to restrict the "Signal Trigger condition" tag to a user-generated enums/dropdown list (corresponding to the Timer Tags for example, or the Self Function Names).

    (But there could be both a expression based ("by name") and a drop-down variant for the related action that call those signals)

    It would be for a different purpose than Real Triggers and built in Functions/Custom Actions.

    And it would solve the longstanding issue that there is no way to create Performant Signals supporting multiple parameters that can trigger multiple event blocks efficiently. Which is a shame in a Eventsheet based game engine.

    But anyway regarding Better Signals this would probably be a better solution : construct23.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C23-I-165

  • The big issue with True Triggers is that AFAIK, it would trigger all the "on timer" events of a behavior each time any timer is finished (can end up being a big overhead if you use the same behavior for many timers and triggers), only to check which trigger event was the one corresponding to the timer that just ended.

    For example if you have "attack1cooldown", "attack2cooldown", "attack3cooldown" and so on.

    When any timer is finished it would have the performance overhead for every single "On timer" Trigger you have for this behavior even if only one is in fact corresponding to the timer tag you want.

    This is a big limitation of c3, there is no efficient way for plugins and behaviors to do that kind of effective true triggers condition based on "tags" or "function names". It scales very poorly in term of performance as the number of different "tags" you're using grows. We have built-in functions when we want to do that kind of stuff in Eventsheet but sadly there is nothing that allows to do that in the Addon SDK right now. This is probably why fake triggers are a thing.

    Ashley do you think there is a chance that one day the Addon SDK would supports new "function-like True Triggers" for Timers or any plugin/behavior that wants to implement some kind of "Self-Functions" ? For example if the issue is that tags or names are strings that can be based on expression, making it impossible for C3 engine to map the right triggers for the right calls efficiently based on a tag, couldn't c3 users create our own tags enums/drop-down list for those new "Functions-like True Triggers based on Tags" ? (Instead of letting the user put any expression in there, this way C3 engine know for sure what to trigger in a performant way like built in Function)

    I suppose the drop-down/enums choice would only need to be done on the Trigger event but there could be both a drop-down and a "by name" variant for their related Call action event.

    Not only those potential Addon SDK "function Trigger" would be useful for Timers but it would also allow to implement a behavior-based "Better Signals"/performant Self Functions supporting multiple params similar to this request : construct23.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C23-I-165

  • I noticed a spike in traffic and sales for Data+ and UIDToAnything, it looks like it came from here, thanks for recommending my plugins, I'm glad they're useful !

    As it seems there is a great interest for them currently I just set up a sale/bundle in case anyone wants to grab them !

    overboy.itch.io/construct-3-json-plus

    overboy.itch.io/construct-3-uid-to-anything

  • I agree scaling a game in C3 can be very hard, but to give credits to Scirra, i think there was tremendous progress made regarding that aspect during the past few years.

    (Templates, Dynamic Layers, Performance improvements, Sublayers, Find Results, Hierarchy improvements just to name a few game-changers stuff that were released)

    I've been working on my biggest project yet for a bit more than a year with C3, and in my experience, using both JS scripting and Addon SDK was unavoidable for a bunch of different reasons due to current Eventsheet limitations. I would advise anyone wanting to make full Steam games to learn using JS in C3 at some point.

    Still, I feel like the community is in right to ask for missing features as C3 is a sub-based evolving software (which is awesome btw!), and we're the actual users of the engine who know the shortcomings based on years of experience we accumulated trying every workaround (including weird eventsheet tricks, behavior hacks, JS scripting, HTML/CSS, and Addon SDK).

    However we need to provide actionnable feedback and fill detailed suggestion on the dedicated platform. And what we ask should make sense in the context of C3 and its own paradigms

    The annoying thing is that sometimes it feels like features suggestions represent a tiny part of the features that are released, but at the same time sometimes i'm glad when Scirra takes cool initiative pushing great stuff no one directly asked. I still hope the balance would continue to grow towards something like >50% of community requested features in the changelogs instead of approx 10%.

    Here are the things i've been missing the most while working and especially scaling my big project with their associated detailed feature request (some were written by me, some by other C3 users) :

    • Hierarchy View

    • Project View Search QOL : Ability to expand searched Folders/Families to find their content too

    • Better Property View (worst part of C3 UX IMO)

    • Right Click > Find all References of Variables directly from Property View

    • Option to automatically select the layer of the selected instance

    • Find : Option to hide/show ambiguous Results

    • Reloading addons without restarting the editor (so Addon SDK is finally pleasant to use)

    (^ Scirra just released this in r363!)

    • Custom Expressions

    • Debugger : per Behavior/Plugin CPU usage

    • Scripting interfaces for Custom Actions

    • MeshPointX/Y/Z expressions

    • Terminate actions for functions/Custom Actions

  • Fib Thanks for those kind words !

    In fact, this is quite the opposite, I always advise to get the UID values of any object at runtime only (whether they were created at runtime or not), using the MyInstance.UID expression to get them directly or to store them in variables to access them later. I never "hardcode" UID numbers.

    There are a bunch of reasons for which UIDToAnything is useful, i'll probably add additional screenshots on the itch page someday so it's easier to understand.

    Indeed if you don't hardcode your UIDs, you need to pick the instance to be able to use UIDToAnything, but ONLY ONCE. For example, let's say you have a Entity family (which contain Player and NPC Objects) with a TargetUID number variable. At some point you could set the TargetUID of your Player Object to the UID of a specific NPC.

    Then you could retrieve any info of this target and act on that NPC instance at any time, without picking them anymore, only thanks to the Player.TargetUID variable. For example you could use the UIDTo.DistanceTo(Player.UID, Player.TargetUID) expression that is packed with the Plugin to get the distance between the Player and that NPC without needing to pick the NPC Object.

    Even better than that, you could then set the TargetUID of your Player to an instance of a barrel Object (Barrel.UID) and your game logic would still work even if Barrel isn't part of the Entity Family. This is an other great aspect of the UIDToAnything Plugin, you can have common logic for different Objects Types and even different Object Classes (Sprite and Text for example) without putting them in the same Family.

    (also C3 don't let put Objects from different Object Classes like Text and Sprite in the same Family, so UIDToAnything allows you to workaround this big limitation of the C3 engine, which is very useful when creating a UI System for your game, as you can share the same logic for your 9-Patch/TiledBG/Sprites/Texts etc)

  • bankthink

    Whether you're using "instance variables" or any "data+ behavior", I would advise against using the Persist Behavior.

    There would be 2 main ways to retrieve your data once you switch your layout :

    You could make the object itself global as oosyrag suggested in their answer to your thread, if this make sense to your game.

    Or create a simple save/load system by storing the data on an other Global Object (putting relevant data in instance variables of this Global Object for example), or just using Global Variable. You could just save/load your Array/Dictionaries behavior data as JSON with single actions (you can store the whole JSON string you'll get into a single String Variable to retrieve it later easily). Same for the JSON+ behavior which would even allow you to have even more control on what you're saving/loading thanks to nested paths.

    All in all, Data+ can definitely help you to create a better save/load system or even simplify stuff a lot if you just go with the Global Object technique but in any case I would advise you to first try to learn how to store and load a instance variable of your object from one layout into an other using Vanilla feature :) Try what oosyrag suggested !

  • Hello RafaelMatos !

    I fixed the Array Behavior Debugger issue and pushed a 2.1 version of the Data+ Pack including those fixes.

    EDIT : I also fixed the o() and snap() expressions issues for the Util addon and pushed a 2.4 version including those fixes. (as we discussed on Discord the remap() expression was already working fine)

    Thanks a lot for reporting those issues :)

    And thank you for your kind words on itch, i'm glad you find those addons useful ! 🙏

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  • BUT THERE IS MORE.

    Last week i was amazed by all the positive comments and messages I got from dozen of C3 devs on various channels (by mail, DM, on Discord and here). It's amazing to know those tools are already used by some devs for whom I have big respect and admiration, on some exciting games made currently made with this engine.

    So I decided to release my new addon for free :

    UTILS (Free Plugin)

    overboy.itch.io/construct-3-utils

    UTILS is an addon adding a bunch of utilities to Construct 3.

    It aims to be that one Plugin that can be useful in any project :

    • by adding a bunch of powerful and flexible Actions, Conditions and Expressions
    • enhancing the capabilities of Vanilla C3 features (Picking system, Hierarchy, Colors, Layers, Math expressions etc)
    • (all features are detailed on the addon page)

    Also, thanks to this tool :

    • no need to copy paste and edit manually all our "utilities" functions in every single project we make
    • no need for each of us to figure out and repeat the same tedious event tricks / complex math shenanigans, on our own, again and again

    UTILS 2.0 100% Funded in 12 hours via C3 Open Collective

    Shortly after publishing this Addon, Skymen suggested that UTILS and its future development (V2.0) could become the first project funded thanks to the brand new "Construct 3 Open Collective" he just created with Armaldio !

    It's a crowdfunding platform for awesome projects and tools released for free for the whole C3 community !

    So yesterday, we went ahead and launched the crowdfunding campaign for UTILS 2.0, and we were just amazed :

    THE UTILS 2.0 PROJECT WAS FUNDED IN LESS THAN 12 HOURS 🎉🎉🎉!!

    Thanks to all the sponsors and backers for their incredible donations to this Plugin !!!

    🏆 GOLD SPONSORS (100€+)

    • Samuel Bromley (500€ !!!) samuelbromley.itch.io

    • Blumgi (200€ !!!) blumgi.com

    • Kind Eye - Mikal (110€ !!!) kindeyegames.itch.io

    ⭐ SPONSORS (20-100€) :

    • Bilge Kaan (50€)

    • fredriksthlm (20€)

    🙏 BACKERS (5-20€) :

    • Salman Shurie (10€)

    I already started working on UTILS 2.0 and it should be released pretty soon !

    We didn't expect to reach our 2 stretch goals so fast, so we added a 3rd stretch goal if anyone wants to contribute to the future development of this Plugin ! (V3)

    THE PLUGIN : overboy.itch.io/construct-3-free-plugin-addon-utils

    THE CAMPAIGN PAGE : opencollective.com/utils

  • DATA+ 2.0 MAJOR RELEASE

    THERE IT IS ! I'm thrilled to announce the new 2.0 MAJOR UPDATE to my Data Management Addon Pack made for Construct 3

    To thank everyone who already bought this pack, and after thinking a lot about how i could improve it as the best Data Management solution for any C3 project, here is what I came up with :

    • JSON+ V2 is here and it is now called DATA+
    • New Addon : Array as a Behavior
    • New Addon : Dictionary as a Behavior
    • JSON+ enhancements : improved a few details on the 2 JSON+ addons (Behavior and Plugin) based on user feedbacks.

    DATA+ 2.0 (Previously JSON+)

    overboy.itch.io/construct-3-json-plus

    In my Roguelike, i've been using JSON+ Behaviors everywhere and keep improving their features to solve all the issues I've ever had regarding Data Management and to have the full power and flexibility that I needed in such a modular Game Project.

    However DATA+ is meant to be a solution adapted to any project (from the most simple to the most complex) and to any C3 dev (from beginners to veterans), and I realized that JSON+ can be a bit overkill for some usecases. Indeed, in some situations Array and Dictionary are good enough. This is why I decided to release those 2 new Addon Behaviors : Array as Behavior, and Dictionary as Behavior.

    This way you can attach as many Arrays and Dictionaries as you want directly as behavior on your Objects and Families ! No need to create a bunch of seperate Objects and painfully picking them !

    (I also added a lot of screenshots on the addon pack page.)

  • Does it have autocomplete for existing keys?

    RafaelMatos

    As the Dictionnaries and Arrays Objects you're using, it doesn't have autocomplete for existing keys by default. (This would be impossible to achieve in Construct 3 for any kind of Data Plugin/Behaviors)

    However, I have included my favorite tips and tricks in the example .c3p provided in the Addon Pack.

    One of them is to use Constant Global String Variable as your Keys, especially the keys that you know that you'll use a lot :

    • This way you'll get autocompletion
    • If you want to reorganize or rename your Data/Properties later, it will auto-update everywhere, you won't have to manually edit everything one by one .
    • Also you can Right-Click > Find all references of that global variable easily to find every single place in Eventsheets where you used that Key
    • (Of course, you can also use Local String Variables if you only need that key in a specific scope, for example if all my Inventory Logic is under the same "Inventory" Group in my Eventsheet, i would use local variable instead)

  • RafaelMatos

    Yes JSON+ would definitely help for that purpose, not only because it would be far easier and efficient to pick and to use, but also thanks to all the enhancements that are provided in JSON+ and listed in the addon page.

    As I explained 2 messages above, it allow you to nest any amount of data under the same behavior. You could replace most if not all your Arrays and Dictionarries with a single JSON+ Object or Behavior if it makes sense in your Project.

    You can create/nest JSON arrays at any Path and JSON+ comes with handy Quality of Life enhancements and ACES for Arrays.

  • RafaelMatos

    In Construct 3, UID are the unique identifiers of your instances. It means that this number is guaranteed to be associated to only one instance in your game. Even Objects from different Families / Object Classes are guaranteed to never share the same UID. Even just created instances can't have the same UID as old instances that were destroyed long before. (instances of Text1, SpriteObject1, SpriteObject2 and FamilyX can't have the same UID.)

    It has always been a really handy feature of Construct for multiple reasons, i probably used them in 90% of my event blocks even before I created UID To Anything that makes them even more powerful.

    The main usecase is that they can act as "Instance Reference".

    You can "store an instance reference" in a number variable "MyUID", and then easily pick that specific instance thanks to the action "Pick by UID".

    To store the UID you want to retrieve later, you need to pick the right instance only once (and set it in a Global/Local/Instance variable for example). "Set MyUID to MyInstance.UID"

    UID TO ANYTHING allow you to do much much more thanks to the UID of your instances, as explained on the page. With this tool, you can do a bunch of actions and conditions but also retrieve expressions or instance variables of your instances only thanks to their UID. (even if you didn't pick those instance in your eventblock, as long as you stored the UID). It also solves a bunch of annoying limitations of the Family features and the Eventsheet in general.

    The UID feature (and, by extension, UID To Anything) can be useful in almost any system you could imagine in Construct.

    For example, let's say you have the "People" Family in your TopDown game, one of this Family feature is that People can target other People (their target). A "People" instance (Instance A) can store a reference of their targeted "People" instance (Instance B) thanks to a number variable called TargetUID.

    If you want to know the distance between Instance A and its target Instance B, you could just use the expressions UIDTo.DistanceTo(People.UID, People.TargetUID). Here People.UID and People.TargetUID are 2 expressions of the Instance A, but they return respectivelly the unique identifier of Instance A and Instance B. Which means you were able to get the data of Instance B without even needing to pick it ! UIDTo.DistanceTo is one of the many expression of the plugin, it allows you to get the distance between 2 objects only thanks to their UID.

    An other interesting thing is with UIDToAnything is that your Target could be an instance from any ObjectType/Family and even any Object Category.

    You could set the TargetUID to an instance of a Props Object (such as a barrel) by setting People.TargetUID to Barrel.UID and it would still work, even if it isn't part of the People Family !

    You could even set People.TargetUID to a Text instance (Text.UID) and your code that get the distance between your people and its target would still work ! Imagine how useful it is for a UI System to be able to share logic between Sprite, 9Patch, TiledBackground, Text and SpriteFonts for example.

    The goal of this plugin isn't to replace everything you were doing in C3 before, but it's an powerful additional toolbox to enhance the capabilities of eventsheet, that can be handy in many common situations and that allow you to work around annoying limitations of the engine.

  • Jase00

    UID is one of the safest feature you could imagine in the whole C3 engine. The UID shuffle option didn't break UID TO ANYTHING in any way.

    The example c3p included in the addon explains the best practices and tips and tricks about using UID in general by the way.

    You can add several JSON+ behaviors onto 1 Object Type but i'm not sure why I would do that in my games. JSON+ allow you to nest as many level of data as you want under the same JSON+ Plugin/Behavior. Let's say you want a JSON+ behavior to handle both the Inventory and the Relationships/Factions of a same object : you would just nest everything related to Inventory under a dedicated "Inventory" Key, like Inventory.EquippedHelmet = "Legendary Helmet", and same for relationship, for example : Relationship.Faction3.Admiration = 0.75. Everything could be under the same JSON+ behavior.

    The main usecase where i would have several JSON+ behaviors on the same Object is if those JSON+ behaviors were inherited from different Families allowing me to make common logic between different sets of Objects.

    For example : if I have an "Entities" Family (with data like Health, Damage Resistances) + a "Characters" Family (with data like Inventory or Relationship), both would have JSON+ behaviors, so an objet that is part of both Families would have 2 JSON+ behaviors