-Silver-'s Forum Posts

  • Fantastic, thanks! And yeah, I'll have to play around extensively before deciding on how to handle the size increase. Zooming out is the first thing that comes to mind, but I don't want it revealing things that should be out of screen for players with incredibly high resolutions.

    Thanks for the help.

  • I'm playing around with a platformer starring a wolf, and may have just realized why most platformers use two-legged characters.

    If the player is standing on the edge of a ledge, then you have issues with overhanging feet, such as this image of Charlie from Deadeye's tutorials:

    <img src="http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc212/darkstorne/Temp22012-01-0913-29-26-32.jpg" border="0" />

    Presumably, this isn't too difficult to fix, since you could use specific animations to bring feet together, or leave one visibly dangling, when the player is close to a ledge's edge:

    <img src="http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/pics7/sonic_2_crop.jpg" border="0" />

    <img src="http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/pics5/sonic-2-hd-remake-2.jpg" border="0" />

    But I'm struggling to think of ways to address this issue with a four-legged animal. He's so long that the 'edge' detection would have to be pretty huge, and switching him to a balancing animation would probably lead to odd teleportations of the sprite - bringing him closer to the edge than he really is, just because his front legs are close enough. Having no balancing animations at all could easily lead to 90% of his length, and three of his four legs, seeming to stand on thin air, just because one of his paws is still on a platform...

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

    Any suggestions?

  • Ahhh yeah, my bad. Thanks!

    So using this, it would be possible for a player to select a resolution from this list, and the game update its display to reflect that decision?

  • Does this also support 64bit Operating Systems? I got an error saying something about no 'win32api'.

    Old thread I know, but contains some very useful information.

  • Probably the size of the project. I tried play testing the layout I was building and got an 'out of memory' error. I'm thinking that Construct can't handle what I'm asking of it =(

  • I get a 'failed to save' message every time I try... well... saving my project. It only just started after roughly an hour and a half of development. I had been saving every 10-15 mins or so throughout, but now it just isn't having it. Even after deleting some recent additions, it still refuses to save.

    Has anyone gotten to the bottom of this yet? I ran a forum search for this issue first, found two similar threads by other users, neither of them had any replies. Is this just a bug no-one has a clue how to fix?

  • Two questions regarding this topic:

    1) Will a web browser be able to play a huge open-world RPG, over a gigabyte in file size, aimed at computers with a minimum of 512mb of VRAM on their GPU (which may even be raised to 1GB)?

    2) Will these HTML5 games be possible to sell on the Steam store?

    If the answer to both is yes, then I could live without an .exe exporter in C2. If the answer is no to one of them, I would need to know that an .exe supporter is coming in the future (in the next 2 years) to use C2 for my project. If the answer is no to both of them, what are you smoking to think that you don't need a .exe exporter at all? That would cut off a massive potential market.

  • Haven't started it yet, cos I am waiting for C2 to get more stuff in it, specially an EXE export, cos it's a little too big for a web game. But this is my particular case, you can still make an RPG right now, but I would suggest to wait for Families/Classes to join the party. <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

    This. Construct Classic has everything you need to make a RPG, but has a few stability issues (apparently) with huge games, like RPGs... So if you're interested in making one with C2, there's no doubt that everything you need will be added in time. Just got to wait.

    And while you're waiting, there's nothing to stop you creating all of your art assets, writing the backstory, the lore, the main quest, exploring your characters etc etc. You've got a good year or two yet I imagine, which is plenty of time to have everything ready, allowing you to blitz straight into the engine without worrying about creating the resources ;)

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    Families and hotspots would top of my list.

  • Thanks for the reply!

    Purchased a Standard license. Good luck with the development guys, I'm glad you're able to make a living out of this now.

  • Rather than start a new thread, I figured I'd drop my questions in here:

    1) If I start with the Standard license and then release a game which goes on to make over �5000, can I then upgrade AFTER those sales figures come through? I can't foresee how well the game will sell, no matter how confident I am, so there wouldn't be a penalty for selling over my license so long as I upgrade asap, would there?

    2) Construct Classic had issues with stability when games became too large. Mine is pretty big as it is, and I'm looking into the possibility of sequels 'bolting-on' like stand-alone expansions (playable separately, or expanding the game world of the original game). How confident are you that C2 won't experience similar stability issues with big games?

    Thanks for reading ^^

  • Its hard to practice something when you only care about the finished product and not the process.

    That's the truth for absolutely everything, especially game development. If you're in it for the money, you won't get far. You have to genuinely enjoy the process of developing.

    It sounds like you aren't much of an artist yourself (not meaning to be offensive here at all). If that's the case, outsource that specific side of your project to an artistic friend or find someone over the interwebs interested in helping out. That way you can focus on working on the elements of design that interest you most, whether that's scripting/eventing to bring the art to life, quest design and writing, whatever excites you.

    If you ARE an artist, and just find it difficult to produce quality work on the computer, then I also highly recommend a Wacom or similar tablet. I have an Intuos 3 and I've never looked back. Trying to draw with a mouse is like trying to draw on paper with three fingers and no thumb. It's possible, but damn does it make things more difficult.

    I draw sprites in Photoshop, then load them up in Anime Studio for animating with bone movement, finally exporting them as .png files to Construct. Very powerful application, animations look very smooth, and it saves a lot of time. There's a 30 day free trial if you're curious.

  • Actually, 512x512 is 1/4 of 1024x1024, so a 512x512x10 animation would be 1/8th, 10MB.

    Oh shoot, of course it would. And even sticking to a 20 frame animation would reduce the 80megs to 20. Ok, looks like that's how it has to be. Cutting down my VRAM usage by three quarters (at least as far as trees are concerned) in exchange for a pretty zoom-in function is going to be worth it.

    Thanks for your help Newt and Arima. I appreciate it. <3

  • An animated 512 or 1024 sprite is huge and the 1024 especially is going to use a ton of VRAM - probably about 80MB. Large images (512 and up) are a huge bottleneck when compiling, though they are cached and don't need to be recompiled until you change them or reload the project.

    Hmmm, okay. I was hoping to use them at that image size so that I could use a zoomed-in 'vanity-cam', allowing the player to zoom in for a closer look at his character, and not have to put up with blurred textures all around. It could also be used to get a closer look at the environment, either for purely aesthetic reasons, or for quests involving tracking for example, and looking for signs of vegetation disturbance or footprints. I may have to drop this idea, and stick to a static camera distance if larger textures are an issue.

    As far as I know, larger textures aren't a problem for GPUs to render (as long as they support them - stick to 1024 and under), though it will take longer to transfer all those textures to the GPU at the start of the frame. That's generally not an issue, though. The bigger concern is a GPU not having enough VRAM - then it will have to swap textures every frame. Your main problems are compile time and VRAM use.

    If you're aiming for 256MB cards (which doesn't mean you have 256mb to work with - the OS uses some, etc.) it might be okay depending on amount of other stuff in the scene, and you could leave the trees animations out and put them back in as the last step before exporting to an exe.

    Without having a 256mb card myself, how would I know whether the game is suitable for them? Is there a MB or VRAM usage I should be aiming to stay under, or would I have to test the game on a 256mb system?

    You sure you can't use that animation system in real time on only the onscreen trees? It would be smoother, use less VRAM, load faster and could be dynamic as well. Unless it requires a ton of cpu time, obviously.

    That's the idea. When a breeze blows across the screen, it animates the trees, shrubs, and long grasses as it passes over them. But I imagine that every tree and object that can be animated would be a problem regardless of whether the animation is playing, since the images used in the animation would still need to be loaded up. Is that right, or are the images only loaded up when they are needed?

    Many thanks for the feedback! ^^

  • One and two, yes.

    Most lower end systems will gag at the bottleneck that will create.

    Check "fps in caption", and that will tell you how much ram your taking.

    Id say more than a few megs for an object will probably be an issue.

    Thanks for the quick reply. Each animation frame of the tree is 4mb, leading to a total of 80mb per tree with the swaying animation. I'm assuming that's crazy, and total overkill. I'll start playing around with chopping down the amount of frames I have for the animation.

    Any tips and tricks I should know about cutting up the image? Such as ideal sizes to cut it into? It's going to be a pain putting them all back together, and setting up the animations for several parts of each tree...

    Also, I'm using PNG images at the moment for the transparency info. Is there another file type I should be considering for lower ram usage?