-Silver-'s Forum Posts

  • The links work, but the .rar that downloads is empty. It is for me anyway. Do yours have something inside?

    As for the brushes, I have Photoshop and know how to create brushes. I experimented with creating several different textures for both the cold and source textures. I just don't understand why they aren't showing up properly. The plasma effect flickers all over the place, flashes on and off when the player moves left and right. I have no idea what's causing it, which is why I was hoping to find a tutorial or explanation about the plasma feature and what all of its various settings actually do.

    I'll see if I can use some of the textures from the above examples, and check if they work for me or not.

  • Yay! Glad to hear it <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Thanks Zy, I found those earlier <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    The first link has dead downloads. The second looks great, but doesn't explain how to get the effects working. I'm wondering if there's some particular way the textures need to be saved, using specific colours or transparency... or something.

    Whenever I try to use the Plasma effect, either nothing is visible at all, only a small corner is visible, or the whole thing is visible but flashes around when the player moves. It varies based on the size of the plasma box.

    I'm probably missing something simple, which is why I would love a tutorial that explains how to use the feature. All I can find are examples of what can be done with it, but not how to actually use it. I want to create my own textures and effects rather than copy/paste someone else's <img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Are there any out there that work? I'm trying to learn how to use it so that I can play around with waterfall ideas, but every time I find a plasma tutorial using the search function, the CAPs are no longer available for download, or they don't really explain what's going on.

    I know the 'source' and 'cold' parts are important, and need textures. But I have no idea what sort of textures. All I've managed to get are blocky and flashing results.

    UPDATE: For some reason Plasma effects aren't working in my .CAP. I can create a new .CAP and get them working just fine. Something in my main .CAP must be conflicting with the Plasma effect though. If you guys can take a look around and see if you can pin point the issue, I'd really appreciate it. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle">

    Here's my .CAP

  • I get an error message when trying to run your CAP. It flashes up for less than half a second before disappearing and auto-closing Construct. It's not the font either, since I've installed it.

    Hopefully someone else can get it working and help you out.

  • Nah, I'm using a real messed up method of calculating angles. I'm an artist and a writer, so I suck at programming <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    Basically, when the player overlaps a slope, I add +1 to the value of a private variable assigned to the player. If he's facing right, and the slope is going down, the private variable starts at 0, and +1 is added every single frame. I then also have a script that always sets the players angle when facing right to be the value of that variable. I put a cap on it so that it can't go over a certain number (degree) based on the slope. In the case of these branches, it's 22 degrees. I also have a similar variable for when he's facing left. I do that for each slope. And then also ensure that when he's on flat ground the calculations work the other way, bringing him back to a normal angle.

    Yeesh. Honestly, it doesn't work all that well. But I'm going to keep trying to tweak with it. I'm planning some more complex additions to smoothen out the transitions between slopes and flat surfaces. I'm sure there's a much better way to go about it though <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    Going to need to take the weekend off though. I'm far too angry about TES Online for any productivity <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Yay! Single collision boxes solved my issues! Well, solved them well enough. Dropping through them works perfectly now <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    The slopes still turn into flat surfaces at the ends for some reason, but I'm not overly concerned about that. I guess it could indicate that the player is about to fall off <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    As for the branch on the left, it turns out that when the player overlaps two different slopes (one going up, the other down) at the same time, the engine just forces him down. No idea why. I've just worked around that by re-arranging the branches a bit so the issue never arises.

    Thanks for your help Jim15 <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Hmmm, then I'm not sure. A new computer might well help, but I have no idea how much. Have you tried running the .CAP on a friend's computer to see if the issue exists on different hardware? If you're okay with uploading it, I could always try loading the .CAP on my computer for you too.

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  • Before you get a new computer, could you list the specs of your current computer? I'm not 100% sure that a new computer will do much to help. My reason being that I spent over �2000 on a new computer last year (two graphics cards, a quad core i7, 16GB RAM, solid state drive) and I often run into slow-downs in my Construct game. I use quite large textures, and if I concentrate too many of them in one area, all interactive with my main character, my frame rate is cut in half.

    I think it's highly likely in my case that Construct is the bottleneck, and not my computer. I just want to make sure this isn't the case for you too before you rush off to spend a lot of money on something that might not work.

  • Thanks for the reply <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    I have a rectangle box for the player (with all the Platform behaviours and collision detections) and have the box set to be invisible. The wolf sprites are set to always appear at the box's location. Not sure if that's per-pixel <img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> Probably is if that's the default.

    I'll try to make a single slope tomorrow and see how it works out. I opted for small slopes so that I could cut down on events. A small slope can be used multiple times for larger slopes, instead of creating a brand new slope platform for every size.

    Thanks for the suggestions. I'll update tomorrow with my progress <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Sorry, another one of these threads, but I couldn't find my answer with the search feature <img src="smileys/smiley9.gif" border="0" align="middle">

    I tend to over-explain things to the point of confusion, so I've uploaded a video showing the problems in action, and a screenshot so you can see how I'm handling the collision for Platform behaviours. I'm assuming the way I'm doing it sucks, and there's a much better way.

    This only happens on slopes. I have flat platforms that don't give me any issues whatsoever, but these slopes are a nightmare. Sometimes the players starts falling through the platforms half-way along (I've tried moving platform boxes in multiple different set-ups, with no luck). The edge of the slopes always turns into a flat surface for some reason, despite the boxes clearly being sloped. And when using the down and jump keys to fall through a platform, the player gets caught up inside the platforms, meaning you have to press down and jump a few times before you drop all the way through.

    I'm trying to get this working for branches in trees. One of the branches on the left is especially problematic. I've even tried copy/pasting the platform boxes from a branch that they're working on to the problem branch, and the player still falls through. I've spent two days trying to solve this now.

    Video is on Youtube

    Screenshot to show collision boxes (with platform behaviour. Branches are tiled backgrounds without any attributes checked).

    Any help and advice would be awesome! Thanks for reading <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle">

    <img src="http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc212/darkstorne/CC.png" border="0">

  • I started out with Construct with the classic "I want to make an RPG!" attitude. I used layout sizes around 15,000 by 15,000 pixels in size, and quickly saw the limitations.

    Because of the huge emphasis I was placing on high resolution hand drawn textures and environments, I quickly surpassed Contruct's limits when it came to loading textures. It just isn't stable enough, and the editor crashed while SAVING as often as it crashed while attempting to play the game.

    So in short: From my experience, only work with massive layout sizes if you are using small and few textures within that layout. Construct seems to want to draw EVERYTHING in a layout at load-up, so creating a whole world in one layout is bound to be problematic.

  • 1) Open your image in Photoshop.

    2) Locate the 'Crop' button on the left hand side tool bar, click and hold until some more options appear, and then click on the 'Slice Select' tool when it appears.

    3) Click on the 'Divide' button at the top of the screen (on the Slice toolbar)

    4) Choose how many times you want to cut the image up, and what sizes you want them at. It should be set up to divide them all equally by default.

    5) ???

    6) Profit!

    From there, you can alter the size of your images so that they are all multiples of 32 pixels. Or you can resize the image first, and then cut it up. So long as you don't need to enlarge the images too much, you shouldn't see any noticeable loss in quality.

  • Yup, using the slice tool. There are plenty of tutorials online for how to use it. Here are a couple I found on the first page of a google search:

    mediacollege.com/adobe/photoshop/tool/slice.html

    adobepress.com/articles/article.asp

    That will cut up the images to whichever size you choose. From there, you just import them into Construct as usual and align them.

    EDIT: Something else worth mentioning: I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's easier on the VRAM or loading times... or something... if the image sizes are a multiple of 32 pixels. So 500 would be 512. 1000 would 1024. There's a possibility I'm crazy and making this all up in my head, but I think that's the reason textures in games are always saved in these slightly odd sizes. Something about it just makes it faster/easier to process. Might be worth tweaking the images a little first (extending the height to 1024) and then cutting them down to 512 instead of 500.

  • 7500 is insane! I wouldn't want to go any higher than 2048.

    Do you know how to use Photoshop's offset tool? That can help a lot with getting images to tile. And then of course you can just import it into Construct as a tiled background. I understand the frustration though. I'm an artist and would love to use dozens of large unique parallax backgrounds on each of my levels, but that cursed VRAM keeps getting in the way :P

    Let me know if you need a hand with the Photoshop work, and I'll see if I can give some pointers or lend you a hand.