skymen's Forum Posts

    Eisenhans Well, I wish he does haha .

    I'll try both. If Construct 3 is as good or better than Spark, there is no way I could leave it.

    Well Ashley, if you read this, please note that a skeletal animator as well as a real time team work would make me fall in love with you.

    Actually, having the editor open source and letting plugins and addons add editors, windows or even change some functions should do the trick. And that would be amazing.

  • Hey, I'm currently working on a Water Essentials pack for Construct 2

    I made dynamic water, like the one in Ori and the Blind Forest:

    And a more static water with animated waves

    I'll also make something concerning water physics.

    I always try to have everything modular in the "WaterBody" object's instance variables, like color, effect padding, wave parameters, viscosity and so on.

    Btw, I'm using the Canvas plugin to "draw" water.

    If any of you is interested in that, please tell me.

    As a Construct 3 big competitor, I shall designate Spark Engine: http://spark.tools/

    It's in dev, they will release an alpha/beta this summer (probably, not sure) and they have a Skype group where they keep fans up to date about the features they added.

    You may want to spy on that Ashley

  • XBox Live is a great place for indie developers. Awesome games were published there. Construct is a great tool for indie developers. Awesome games were made using it. There's not any other way to explain how much we need this :p.

  • Ok, I just found out something absolutely amazing. If an object is loaded in memory once, it loads a lot faster the next times you create an instance of that object. So I put an instance of my heavy object in the splashscreen at 1 opacity. And that's not quite a problem as the default Contruct 2 loader gives feedback on what has been loaded. And after that first, longer loading (about 7 seconds, when it took 1 before), but after that , other loadings take only one to two seconds when they took 10 seconds. And that works even though the object is not global. I wonder if it only depends on the computer's specs, if the object stays loaded on RAM for a while or if something else in going on. I'd like to know

  • Well, that's not sure, because, in some cases, what is not rendered is not loaded into memory. I prefer being sure to have it rendered as my object is pretty dark and my background plain dark.

  • Well, there are a few possibilities. It really depends on the game.

    A few exemples can be Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaishi 3 where you could mash a button to do an action while the game was loading. Like having Goku eat loads of food, Vegeta doing pushups, or Gohan extract excalibur from the ground.

    You could also have the player see a little animated loading, like the one present in the simpson game, where you would have Itchy and Scratchy hitting each other all over the screen. Or even have some hidden things that would reveal things about the game. Let's say, each time a level loaded, you had a really tiny sublevel, where you would have to move your mouse through a pattern before the loading ends so it can reach a key, some gold, or some easter egg and/or information about the game.

    The real question, is not "why do you need that?" but more "why can't you have that". The goal of softwares like Construct relies on making something that was first a bit hard, becoming simple, while keeping its freedom. So for every tiny little thing that can be done using code, you should be able to do the same using Construct. Plus Construct is waaay past the state where there was still big features left to have done. The only thing that has been done through the Construct releases are mostly bugfixes, fixing compatibility issues or changing some features. So adding this kind of features, the ones that has been requested by the community is the only thing left Construct may want to add.

    oosyrag Yeah, I know, I'll try to have the object created in the loading screen at 1 opacity, like backendfreak told me and see how it went.

  • Well, thanks. Your second idea is really good. What's eating up most of my memory is a screen object that displays a lot of different animations.

    I'll see if I can somehow preload it anywhere, and make it global so it is not deleted. That may not be a good idea though. I'll try what you said, and let you know.

  • Yeah, at first, I intended to have only one of these 3D cubes showing. This was not made to be optimized. Plus it got out of hand as I finished with a whole city of these cubes .

  • Yeah, that may do the trick, but is indeed a lot more complicated. But, having placeholders for big objects and replace them in my custom loading screen is a good idea. However, that may make the level design a bit more complicated, as big object tend to have more animations, or bigger resolutions. And if they do have a lot of animations, you may want to have multiple instances of this object and each one running a different animation on start. It would take a bit of coding to have this done along with the placeholder. But that's very complicated.

  • Well, in my case, I have a layout that can take up to 10 seconds to load entirely. Which is quite problematic. Plus, my loading screen features an animated "loading...", which appears frozen as soon as the next layout begins loading. I understand that that may be used in bad ways, but that's not an excuse for not having this feature. If someone can't use Construct properly, that's not your fault, but theirs.

    Anyway. That would really help to have that kind of feature. It would bring a lot of new possibilities for loading layout creation. So please, really consider the idea. (Even if it's not perfect at first, as long as you can have this done with minimum freeze. FPS drops in loader layouts are not a problem. Constant freeze is one)

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  • Hey, I'm asking the community's scripters, or even Ashley to try and make this.

    What I'm asking is a plugin (or directly in the System tab, if Ashley does it), that would have this:

    Actions:

    Preload layout

    Preload layout (by name)

    Preload Object

    Condition:

    On layout loaded

    On layout loaded (by name)

    On Object loaded

    Expression:

    LayoutPreloadProgress that would take an argument Layout Name. Or leave blank if referencing the last Preload launched.

    ObjectPreloadProgress that would take an argument Object Name. Or leave blank if referencing the last Preload launched.

    LayoutLoaded would return the name of the last loaded layout.

    ObjectLoaded would return the name of the last loaded layout.

    What would that be useful for? Well, loading screens of course! This has been a common problem with big Construct projects. As soon as a layout or an object is a bit heavy (if it features a lot of animations for exemple) it takes forever to load, and makes the FPS drop a lot or even makes the layout freeze completely. Being able to preload the next layout in background before going to it, or preload an object in background before creating it would solve those problems.

    Plus I'm pretty sure this is possible, because Construct already does it to preload the game's musics and sounds at the start of the game, and a lot of games do feature this to make mini games and/or animations as loading screens.

  • Well, imagine this:

    I have a loading screen that has an animation in it or even a minigame, or anything to keep the player focused.

    Right now, I can't have this, because you cannot preload another layout in background. So to have this you have to "simulate" a loading screen, make it do what you want, and then go to another layout. However, this is problematic, because, if you have a layout that needs a lot of memory, the current layout completely freezes while the other layout loads, and when it finally shows, you have a quite big FPS drop.

    Having a way to preload another layout before going to it would fix those problems.

    In my case, sometimes, a layout can take up to 10 seconds to load properly.

  • Well thanks. I'll try to make something like this. However, it's still quite problematic. Can't we have a feature like "preload layout" and when the layout is fully loaded, have an event "On layout loaded". I may ask this as a plugin request.

  • Hey, at the moment, to load the heaviest layouts, I use another layout that displays a text and an animation while the next layout is loading. However, my problem is that everything stops as soon as the next layout starts loading, including the animation. That gives the layout a froze effect, and that's quite problematic. So is there a way to have the layout continue to run as long as the next layout is not fully loaded yet?