samwellb's Forum Posts

  • 9 posts

  • Hi Ashley Just came across this post as it's happening to me too today. Is there a place where I can check the status of the Construct server and website? I've had a few times recently where I haven't been able to access the program for a few hours when construct.net has appeared to be inaccessible. To be clear - this is absolutely not a problem! To be honest in my years of using Construct I'm amazed how stable and reliable it is. :) It would just be really useful to have a page somewhere to check if there is an outage that it is or isn't something to do on my end and also that it's something you guys are aware of already and doesn't need reporting again. Best wishes

  • Sorry - the trailer link didn't seem to work! Here it is again:

    youtube.com/watch

    Hope you enjoy!

    Thanks

  • Hey everyone.

    Happy to be able to say we just released our very first game! It's called Hallows Hill and is a spooky, cinematic, virtual escape room.

    It's designed to be played in small groups (though solo is fine if you're feeling daring and clever!) and we've made a companion 'app' (also in Construct) to help teammates discover clues.

    It's available to buy direct from our website with 10% off at the moment for Halloween :)

    https://wolfescapegames.com/

    Here's the trailer and some screen shots:

    [img=68063

    I also wanted to give a shout out to this forum. We're a tiny team and I'd never done a single days programming until 2 years ago. I've literally learned everything I know so far through a cross-reference of the forum and the manual. So thanks to all those who give their time and advice. There is a great, positive, supportive attitude here (something that is not always easy to find!) and it's definitely Construct's secret weapon in my view. I hope to be able to contribute more as my skills improve.

    If anyone is tempted to play the game - all feedback is very welcome! And if you have any questions about it I'd be happy to answer as best I can.

    Thanks!

    Sam

  • Thanks Ashley. That's exactly what we needed to know :)

  • Hi everyone. Hoping someone can help me understand if worker mode will help our game.

    It's a point and click style adventure / escape room so pretty static. For each puzzle win there is a win video - h264 mp4s ranging from 0.5 to 20mb. Everything else is figuring out clues and inputting codes.

    We've made sure to build it to run in worker mode. It does and everything is great. But there are a couple of add-ons we need to use that no longer support worker mode.

    Up until now I've just understood worker mode to be 'better' but now we have a 'support Vs features' choice I'm trying to understand what the real-world benefits of it actually are for the kind of game described, specifically around video playback.

    Should we fight hard to keep it on or not worry so much and just use the plugins we need?

    All guidance greatly appreciated! Thanks

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  • Thanks for testing — Really appreciate that.

    Yes performance is Chrome is pretty good. I can see a tiny difference in smoothness between 1st and 2nd plays of the same video so I guess it's still not preloading fully. Chrome just does a far better job of streaming and buffering.

    So far the best solution I've come up with for Safari is to encode all the videos at 60fps (so at least the stutter is less noticeable).

    The even weirder thing for Safari is that I've currently had to implement a layer underneath the video that turns on once the video above starts to play that has the last frame of the video on it as a still. This is because Safari seems to get to the end of the video - hide the video layer as intended, then flash up the last frame again for a few frames for no reason and then hide it again! Which again - doesn't happen on the 2nd play of a video so seems also to be tied to the buffering / preload issue.

    I just wonder if the preload function is not working as intended or I'm just misunderstanding what it's supposed to do? It's frustrating to see the videos play so well on the second viewing and not be able to get that same experience for players on the first play.

  • Hi everyone. I'm having real issues getting video to playback consistently.

    I am using short videos to transition between layouts in my game. The first time a video plays, performance is choppy and there is a strange glitch in Safari when it seems to repeat a flash frame at the end.

    Once a video has played once however, repeat plays are buttery smooth.

    The videos are very short and small and Ive tried all kinds of variations in bitrate, frame rate etc. Nothing seems to make any difference.

    It appears that the 'preload' function of the videos isn't working and that they only load on play. And that for some reason first playback is poor. This seems to happen on all browsers however Safari is much worse than Chrome.

    Here is a link to a small project that will demonstrate the issue:

    dropbox.com/s/6h6y2szw2enmcsp/VideoPlaybackTest_v1.c3p

    Can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong and if there's a way to get better video playback performance on videos the first time they are played?

    Our game uses video transitions a lot as you can see so we'd really like to get to the bottom of this if we can. All help greatly appreciated! Thanks!

    (current video encoding settings are: H264 mp4 / main profile VBR 3Mbs / 1600x900 / encoding from After Effects in Adobe Media Encoder)

  • Thanks DFORMS. That's not quite what I meant but I didn't know that was possible so thanks! Bonus knowledge. :)

    What I was wondering essentially is if it's possible to do the same thing but with an entire instance of a tilemap rather than a single tile?

    I'm actually starting to think I've mis-understood the concept of instances and objects though!

    I do have a workaround at the moment which is to clone my tilemap object and make the changes to it which makes it a unique object that i can create elsewhere.

    My question then becomes - Is this a sensible idea? If I have 2 tilemap objects that both use the same tileset does Construct automatically use the same tileset image for both objects or am I in danger of creating duplicates?

    Thanks!

  • Hello. Apologies for this basic question. I appreciate there are already a lot of posts about this. I feel like I've read them all twice and I'm afraid I still can't quite get my head around it!

    I have a holding layout with 3 different instances of a tilemap object. I'm trying to spawn this tilemap in my main level layout using those instances but I can't figure out how to target them inside the create event.

    I can do 'system - create object - tilemap' simply enough but how do I go one level deeper and select the specific instance that I want to create?

    I thought I might be able to do this with the UID's but I can't work out how or where to do so within the create event. I have also tried to add instance variables to each instance and target them that way but again, I can't figure out where in the event sequence I can state which variable I want.

    I suspect it might be a logic issue on my part. My expectation is that I should be able to create a specific instance of an object on my layout.... but I'm now wondering if I need to create the object type first then somehow switch its instance to the desired one?

    Any help understanding this concept would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if my question needs clarity. As you can probably guess, I'm very much the rookie programmer!

    thanks in advance

  • 9 posts