SgtConti's Forum Posts

  • The origin

    Back in 2014, I released the little Construct 2 game called Shadows of War pitching the shadows of a NATO army against Russian forces in a simple sidescroller strategy game. While it was plagued by a number of bad design choices and development techniques from the start, it still saw at least some sales and inclusions in several bundles, pushing it past the 50,000 owners mark and a peak player base of 264 on Steam. Most of the reviews are negative, and rightfully so —it was never perfect, but constant improvements are part of the fun while developing things.

    Working with Construct 3

    Since then a lot has happened; much of the fiction turned reality, and Construct 3 has now been around for some time - which meant time to test the new features and work on a remake / successor to the original game. 

    Development has been off and on for some years (mostly off), but this year seems to be when it finally begins to take shape, with most of the basic systems working.

    The new engine proves to pack some punch, and with past errors in mind, the process has been quite fun so far.

    A lot of the basic systems and functionality are implemented, for example:

    • Unit movement / actions
    • Support & Commander system with a total of 18 abilities
    • Multiplayer (Syncing, chat, automatch, etc.)
    • Procedural background generation
    • Options & language localization (Missing accesibility features)

    Though currently it is more of a pre-alpha, with most if not all of the proper graphics missing, balancing outstanding and bug hunting on the to-do.

    Preview

    Here is a quick screenshot of the current progress, and some of the new features really shine through: 

    While most mechanics do work, there is still a lot of work left...

    I will treat this topic as a sort of blog post for the development process, but if you have any questions, please do ask.

    Ashley Any update about Greenworks now that 0.13 is near release?

    Ashley - if you could look into Greenworks 0.5.0 which released a few days ago and added some more functionality that would be great.

    Also it seems to have resolved the issues with 0.12.1 - so it should be working now as intended with newer nw.js versions.

    https://github.com/greenheartgames/gree ... tag/v0.5.0

    Ashley any update on the matter?

  • I know, but if you have multiple instances, and you need to pick one specific having that specific velocity, that could be a problem.

    At least I dont know how to do it.

    //Edit: I found the system condition to compare the values while picking an instance. The manual is alway helpful, even after 500+ hours of Construct 2 use

  • This plugin is quite amazing and so far it has delivered a far better experience for my game than Box2D has done.

    1 thing that I think could be implemented though is:

    Condition: Compary Velocity

    Condition: Compare Velocity X

    Condition: Compare Velocity Y

    Ashley are we going to seen an updated 0.4.1 c2addon anytime soon?

  • Ah, that's a good point about multicore...doesn't your processor have 6 cores? If you are still subs-60fps at low rez, then maybe airscape is cpu bottlenecking on your system. Really doesn't seem like the demo should be doing that though...

    Even though my processor has 6 cores it doesn't make any difference for *most* html5 applications as they only can utilise 1 core.

    There are Web Workers that could add Multicore support or the new JXcore (I would love to see JXcore used for a C2 game).

    And yes, that's exactly what I am trying to say that it may be a CPU problem. And I am quite sure that a 3.8GhZ core should be able to run it if optimised.

    Based on my theory it would explain most stuff, as to why the 3D test run so much better (Because not much CPU power required there).

    One thing it does not explain then though is the fact that Canvas2D is faster than WebGL.

  • — Correct me if I am wrong, but the you can't just compare a a range of products like 6300M with a single product like the Mobility 5430 in such a case.

    It would be like if I would compare the GTX 900 series with the GTX 770.

    So it would be usefull to know which of the 6300M models have been used.

    Since a 6370M is better than a 6330M which you both would compare (and set equal) to the 5430 in your case.

    I'm sorry but this had to be

  • SgtConti

    Just for clarification, did you try shrinking the window down ridiculously small? Did you get 60fps then? If not, then there's definitely some stuff that needs working out. The jittering seems to mostly be caused by fillrate issues which leads me to assume it's still GPU related.

    Unfortunately I can't share the capx as there's a lot of copyrighted material in there.

    I attached a screenshot with the resolution (Lowest possible) and still it shows the FPS drop to 39 fps that I captured in the image ^^

    Yeah, understandable with the capx, well, you could replace the art with some MS Paint stuff tho

    SgtConti's results are particularly bizarre...I wouldn't exactly call that a 'mid-range' system, unless we are throwing $5000 alienware's into the mix. No C2 game should be struggling on a computer like that.

    Since it only is (nowadays) about a 700-800$ rig I would call it mid-range. As you can get a real High-End rig for about 1100$ (Or more) ^^

    And well, without multicore support it still is easily possible for an unoptimised or really big game to struggle on such a rig.

  • sqiddster I tried that, and while it did help with getting 60fps a bit more often the fps still tanked down to 40 (48) fps at times with alot of jittering.

    //Note: I would be very interested to see the capx of the stripped down version to see if I may identify something from there on.

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  • Reading through all of this and testing out your demo I have a hard time believing it is the GPU causing these frame drops/bad performance etc.

    I would say I have a rather Middle-End PC:

    AMD X6 1090T —

    8GB DDR3 RAM

    2x AMD HD6870

    I've tested the demo in firefox/chrome and it barely got stable 60fps, with frame drops down to 48fps and an average fps of around 55.

    In my opinion it can't be a GPU problem if I get these values, but rather a case of maybe bad CPU optimisation? (As one core was used around 100% during testing)

    Don't get me wrong you've probably optimised it as best as you could, but for example my game SoW which is rendered in 1080p with downscaling of some assets etc. has a by far more stable performance (60fps fluid) on my machine and on a laptop with something like 2x 1.8GhZ and an Intel HD3000 where I got around 20-30fps.

    Additionally to that, the fact that you get better performance with Canvas2D is quite shocking, because when I tested SoW with Canvas2D I barely got around 10fps on my pc

    Quite weird the whole case, I'll just follow this case and see if I may get an idea at some point as to why it happens.

  • gz on greenlight C-7 <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    Though I should mention, that Shadows of War has been on Steam for some time now:

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/340220/

  • Problem Description

    The Timer is not affected by timescale.

    According to the manual: "The rate of On timer triggering is affected by the time scale."

    So I thought this may be a bug because it is not.

    Attach a Capx

    Done

    Description of Capx

    At displays how long the timer took to trigger.

    The first value is with default timescale (1).

    The second value displays is with timescale 2 (Double Speed)

    Observed Result

    The second value is ca. 1 second

    Expected Result

    The second value should be ca. 0.5 seconds

    Affected Browsers

    • Chrome: YES
    • FireFox: YES
    • Internet Explorer: YES

    Operating System and Service Pack

    Windows 10 TP 64-Bit

    Construct 2 Version ID

    197

    Aurel I experience the exact same issue (Only when using Greenworks)

    So I guess there are some compatibility issues there.