part12studios's Forum Posts

  • Ok so I finally had a little time to do some testing with my first Ouya / C2 game "Bee Active" which was originally published with CocoonJS before it was depreciated. That version ran surprisingly well, however the problem with CJS was that there was no way to do any kind of paid / IAP system.

    I was able to get the latest (never released) version of Bee Active for the Ouya using the new Chromium wrapper created by Tim over at Ouya. The result was pretty good, but I am going to talk with him about some optimization exploration.

    The most noticeable issue is there are these black lines that popup up now and then. You can see them first hand on Controller Quest, though I let them slide because they didn't happen that often and this is largely because the game simply doesn't have much going on visually. Bee Active, the lines were much more noticeable. The frame rate is still pretty good but I could tell it was simply not as solid as the CJS verison.

    So yea if you're doing a very simple game it should be fine, but if you're doing a serious C2 pixel pushing game you may not be in love with it as it is, but don't despair, I know Tim had talked about optimization in the past, we just both got busy with other things once Controller Quest was launched and working.

    Also I got a chance to review some of the other tools Tim had me install to help with things and one important tool was "Google Chrome Canary", which honestly I never really utilized and is optional, but basically was good for capturing information. However for the debugging that Tim was doing it was super helpful for him, so anyone who knows this tool, might benefit from it

    Also be sure you open up a cmd screen when you run things.. type in "adb logcat" and you will have access to a ton of awesome realtime information.. you can see buttons being pressed and your ouya doing stuff.. very cool.

    I also installed a program called "SourceTree" which is where I got the zip command line software. I got very hand held through this so if you get this far and have questions, just post it on the Ouya forums thread and I'm sure Tim will give you a very insightful response on the steps involved.

    Other than that everything else you need is on the ouya / construct 2 and html5 sections to get you setup.

    Controller Quest has done pretty well. 340 installs in less than a month.. which is over x2 as many installs of bee active which has been live for almost six months.. so it's nice to see people are finding it and hopefully finding it useful.

  • I'm looking forward to the next update to test with XDK/Cordova. The current version 2.1 fails to wrap the files folder content into the game.

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  • You bet, i had a side project of digitizing a bunch of old records that was taking up my ouya test device space.. i'm going to do some testing with it again soon and I'll share more of the specific things needed to push to Ouya over usb/wifi. I am working on some Q3D stuff and I want to test out how well it ports to Ouya.

  • Like Grimbarian said, it's mostly following the sdk setups and all that as found in the documentation. the extra little something (that i got walked through, so I haven't memorized) was that when i export my HTML5 project it went something like this:

    Initial Setup:

    • I would unzip the ouya-sdk-examples-master zip to my desktop (make sure you have the latest, which should be pretty stable now)
    • remove everything but the Construct 2 and HTML5 folders (you need the HTML5 folder!), as there are a lot of other engine folders and such you just don't need..
    • install the plugins, note that you need to overwrite the actual C2 audio and gamepad objects. the ones that C2 provide will not work right. Remember each time you do an update to C2 you have to update the audio and gamepad since they get overwritten by the update.
    • be sure you have adb connect on, on the Ouya
    • If you're doing it over wifi, in the PC cmd area type "adb connect 10.0.1.23" or whatever your IP address is on your Ouya to insure it's connected.

    NOTE: There are other configuration steps you need to do for your game specifically that I'm not going to go into here.. but once all that's done so the below steps are what I do once all that other stuff is setup.

    • When I export a standard HTML5 project i pointed it to Construct2/Controller_Quest
    • Go over to the HTML5/WebArchive folder and run the 5_install.com script which goes over and grabs my Controller_Quest folder and processed it, signs it builds the apk and then pushes it over to the Ouya either over wifi or MicroUSB cable from PC (wihich is about x3 faster)

    I'm not in the PC side of my Mac where all my ouya stuff is configured, but this is just nice stuff to have eventually worked out. It's not necessary to publish to the Ouya, it was just a nice little extra thing to push straight to the Ouya and auto-install. You don't need this though, I used dropbox as a means to sync the apk on the Ouya.

    Regarding performance, as soon as I have some time, I wanted to go back and try Bee Active with this system not only to add IAP stuff and such, but also as a benchmark. My initial findings make me think performance is not as good as CocoonJS. So I would advise anyone wanting to try the ouya should do some stress tests, which would be pretty easy to do.

    Thanks,

    Caleb

  • Hi there,

    I have this game where I have 7 different player characters. each one has it's own set of animations. they are all the same animations just different graphics.

    I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach this. One thought is to have seven different objects and spawn the one, but that seems like it would get into a lot of

    On the other hand, maybe having all of the animations nested inside one player object is better? Then this seems to also be riddled with a ton of "set animation" rules, which seems ok, but then another concern is which approach might be better for memory.

    having one object have all the animations in it might be more taxing on older devices than having them broken up into separate objects created at the start of a game when needed.

    I'm just curious if anyone else has come across this kind of situation and /or has insight on the best approach.

    Thanks!

    Caleb

  • codah thanks man! I have a buddy who did some work with anchors, but at the time it just seemed like extra work for little gain, but that was before I really wanted to remove any black boxes. Now I'm realizing it's usefulness.

  • codah ah right anchor, I've heard about that before but never really explored it. I wasn't really sure what it's good for.

    Also Ribis that's cool. viewportleft.. didn't know about that one.. I'll give those a try and see how they work.

    Lunatrap the thing is that i don't want letterbox because that creates black boxes. I'm trying to create something that uses scale inner (or outer depending) and insure that the scores and other hud information can be flush to the edges of whatever screen the player is on..

    I knew it had to be simple, I just wasn't sure what the best approach or perhaps official way to do it that I was unaware of.

    Thanks!

    Caleb

  • Bump, I'm really surprised there hasn't been a good informed answer on this. Maybe it really is impossible to do, but it just seems like having things be "justified" to the left / right / top / bottom could really be helpful in making games that can take full advantage of a wide range of devices and not rely on letterbox / black boxes.

    I realize not every game would be able to take advantage of this, but I think a lot of people could if they know the tools are available.

  • You bet! I still need to go back and try Bee Active with this new wrapper not just to add IAP, but also performance. I am a little concerned that performance isn't optimal with Chromium, but I don't want to pass judgement till I've done an objective test. Performance isn't "bad" but it feels like the way it's behaving with some of my Donator effects, a heck of a lot more sprites were moving around much faster with the CocoonJS game. We'll see. Also there are likely optimizations that might be explored as well. I think it comes down to how many people in the C2 community take advantage of this. The more people there are interested the more likely we'll see serious effort on Ouya's part to give us more of their time to make things better.

  • Hi everyone,

    I worked with Tim over at Ouya and I'm happy to report that https://www.ouya.tv/game/Controller-Quest/ is now on Ouya. This is an app designed to help you test any connected Ouya controllers to insure everything is working as it should.

    I made this app free but added a donate button to allow people the option to pay if they like. However what is nice is that you have everything working now. You can do IAP either permanent or consumable. I went with a permanent one time $3 donation option. I check when the game loads if that person has made a donation and if they have I tell them how awesome they are and put on a little show in the main menu.

    here is a good place to start https://github.com/ouya/docs/blob/maste ... md#setup-1

    However beyond IAP, they also have screen resizing to allow you to account for users who might experience overscan issues (my TV does this) even though I didn't bother with it for this app because it wasn't necessary I did test it and it worked.

    Full Disclosure, there are some configuration things you may want to do eventually if you're going to do a serious Ouya project. It's not terrible, but once it's setup its really nice.. I'm able to do a build from C2.. as a standard HTML5 game.. then run the batch file and it does all the compiling and pushes the APK to the ouya directly.

    Thanks,

    Caleb

  • Bump, it just seems like there must be some straightforward ways to get this to work.

    I can think of some ugly hacks like having an appear and be told to move in a certain direction till it hits the edge of the screen, but all of this sounds very ugly / inefficient.

    it seems like images and objects could be told things like "Center" and left and right "justified". Top and bottom aligned. I know that for example admob can do this with it's ads, it would seem to make sense that objects in C2 would be able to in some way be told to behave in a similar fashion.

  • are you doing it for mobile or web? if you're doing mobile, consider using XDK / Cordova with Cranberry's plugins. There is a Social Network Sharing plugin that allows you to call on iOS / Android share features like text messaging. I'm using it in my game and it works great.

  • Hi everyone,

    I'm very familiar with this tutorial https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/73/sup ... reen-sizes and I get it in terms of how this works, however I'd like to take it a step further and feel there must be a way to do it.

    What I would like to do is adapt the HUD information to always appear at the far edge of a screen rather than in a fixed place.

    A classic example would be that I want to support the iPhone 4s and 5s.. if I design it for the 5s giving the best full screen portrait look possible I then do letterbox and 4s users get black bars.

    If I design it for the 4s, then I do scale Inner (or is it outter?) and I end up with a bunch of empty space above an below where the score would sit.

    What I would like to achieve is some way to tell the Text / HUD objects (pause button for example) to not just be at a certain x,y coordinate, but actually have them always appear at the "Top" or "bottom' of the screen. Then I could design my background images and other things accordingly.

    I have a game where I'd like to move the score and other hud stuff to the far left and right (in this case landscape) but if an iPad user were to play the game that info would get cut off and if i account for the ipad2 croppage then there is a ton of wasted space on the left and right side.

    I'm sure there must be a way to do this, but I don't know how. It's also probably super easy. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    Thanks!

    Caleb

  • Hi everyone,

    I worked with Tim over at Ouya who developed a nice Chromium wrapper to allow HTML / C2 games to be wrapped. He made a custom plugin for Ouya.

    https://www.ouya.tv/game/Controller-Quest/ check it out. Totally free. I added a donate button to add a little fun unlock element to it, but it's not disabled in any way.

    I created the app to allow all ouya users to be able to test out all of their buttons in a nice simple environment. It supports all four devices connected simultaneously. Give it a try for yourself.

    if you want to find out more about C2 / Ouya check this link out https://github.com/ouya/ouya-sdk-exampl ... Construct2 I plan on doing a tutorial for this in the near future but I have some immediate deadlines that got pushed off to get this thing live in the first place <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile"> Plus we're polishing a few rough edges still that don't prevent launch, but should be addressed in the near future.

  • ok so yea it's out there now. https://www.ouya.tv/game/Controller-Quest/ with IAP working. Please feel free to try it out. It's totally free. The donate thing is just a little optional thing I put in there to make sure I could really make something that could be monetized. I'm going to do an official post about this launch shortly.