Televangelist's Forum Posts

  • Fair enough! For my part, I'm going to keep building my game; it's almost certainly a multi-year project, so if I come back a couple of years now with a game that's fully finished and ready to go except C2 is missing a feature required to make it all work, I suppose we can see where we're at then.

    Hopefully some of it are things that even if we get no further additions could be kludged into the current system inartfully but effectively if there's a good reason to (like saving a given player's characters in a permanent database).

  • "Most of the people who come in don't end up completing a project" is simply the reality of selling a game development engine, not anything unique to multiplayer games. Most of the people who come to C2 looking to make a single player game don't finish a project, either; game development is simply an onerous task even if art and coding are handled and you're free to design your heart out.

    But more importantly, if the flood only happened when the initial post went up, that's even further indicative of a marketing failure; it's not like there are any fewer people out there thinking about creating an online game, and it's not like more than a tiny fraction of them have tried out C2. There's still a high flow of enthusiastic types checking out Xtremeworlds or Eclipse or whatever other D-list solution every day. I've yet to come across a single complaint on those sorts of forums against C2's multiplayer -- the problem is simply that very few people know you exist in that space.

  • Thanks so much to both Nesteris and Unnatural20 for great and very informative replies! I really appreciate it.

    My only concern with dropping the solid property of the wall temporarily is that if my game is multiplayer online, it might allow other players to 'walk' through the fence while the acrobatic move is active. If I have to pick one object being solid or another, the player being invulnerable might be preferable to allowing other players to 'cheat'.

    Could this be solved by simply not updating the state of the 'Acrowall' object for multiplayer? So it's fully client-side, and an acrowall being 'non-solid' on my client has no impact on other players? Or are things like that forced to update/sync when using multiplayer?

  • Ashley , allow me to offer a contrary perspective on why uptake has been slow -- Outside of the people who already use Construct 2, nobody at all knows you offer it.

    I've had a particular game concept in my head for a very long time. The concept is multiplayer by definition, you can't really make it singleplayer and it wouldn't be any fun in that environment. Every few months, I would relentlessly google to see if an engine was available yet to hobbyist non-coders that would allow me to complete the project.

    It was only on a whim, after exhausting virtually all of my googling, asking in relevant forums, etc., that I hopped onto the Construct 2 forums to think about single player projects (after not having paid any attention to you guys for years) and discovered through a random blogpost of yours that you had added multiplayer support several months earlier.

    If you guys want projects to make use of it, there are so many things you could do to actually get the word out. Banner ads on sites: "BUILD MULTIPLAYER GAMES WITH NO CODING -- CONSTRUCT 2!", advertising on places devoted to systems like RPG Maker and MMF that also attract hobbyists that don't attract multiplayer support, buying a clickbait-y site http://www.buildmultiplayergames.com/ and redirecting it to Scirra.com. Press releases sent to Kotaku and Escapist and MMORPG.com and all of the other major gaming news outlets.

    The issue is not that people don't want to build multiplayer games with C2; it's that you built a Killer App and then haven't marketed it in the slightest to the people who might be interested, you've only looked at the people who use C2 already and their adoption of it.

    This is not an attack or even a criticism really, just an explanation. I am the quintessential example of someone who has been *dying* for someone to make what you've made here, for ages now. Your target customer for a feature you spent tons of time on, someone who was relentlessly googling to try and find an engine that does what C2 now does. And I couldn't find it by searching, I only happened upon it randomly on a lark.

  • > Hmm... if the player temporarily turns non-solid, would that prevent the player from being hit by bullets/projectiles during that stretch of time? That would be a major problem...

    >

    That could be a bonus side-effect of doing an acrobatic move.

    Could be, but would be less than ideal.

    Is there a way to 'override' the player's movement and position, including collision with walls, without changing his ability to interact with bullets/projectiles?

  • I'm a little shocked we can't do that currently -- it seems like such a basic, easy-to-implement feature that is important on so many levels.

  • Hmm... if the player temporarily turns non-solid, would that prevent the player from being hit by bullets/projectiles during that stretch of time? That would be a major problem...

  • What's been accomplished already is quite impressive, and as far as I can tell is far and away the best multiplayer support available to non-coder hobbyists like myself.

    Are additional features planned in 2015 to flesh out multiplayer support, particularly for people aiming to create multiplayer games that take place in worlds with a degree of permanence?

    What's already done seems like the hardest part; things like querying databases on a dedicated server for player character information, or allowing people to use AWS for dedicated game hosting, are significantly easier than what Ashley's already done.

    And as much as many of us might like to ridicule those who attempt such grandiose projects without knowing what they're getting into, features that allow C2 to pitch itself as a "build your own MMO" option would likely result in a serious influx of cash from people rushing to get into the engine, both for Scirra itself and for the plugin and asset sellers who would rise up to serve that audience via the C2 marketplace.

    So, I'm wondering -- what's the road map for C2 multiplayer going forward into 2015?

  • Newt, why would any of the features in question be 'not doable' in C2? How does the GUI Lib issue relate to this?

  • My game is played from a Zelda-like perspective.

    So far, it's been easy to handle collision; apart from the visual layer, I have a separate collision layer, not visible to the player, with bright red squares marking off everywhere the player can't go.

    However, in my game the player has an 'acrobatics' ability. When pressing the acrobatics button plus the appropriate direction, the player is supposed to be able to cross some (but not all) physical obstacles.

    So, for example, instead of being stopped by a fence, he vaults over the fence. Instead of being stopped by the wall of a building, he runs up the wall and lands on the roof of the building.

    I'm pretty sure what I need to do is have a new layer that defines 'acrobatics areas' of a given level; areas where pressing a certain key combination (acrobatics key plus appropriate direction) will produce a certain result in terms of player movement and animation. But how do I do this on the player movement side? Is there a way to make the player 'intangible' for passing through the wall and force a specific pattern of movement (run up the wall and land on the roof, vault the fence, etc.) that temporarily overrides the player's normal controls, while still making the player vulnerable to bullets and other projectiles?

    Thanks!

  • Looking into the relative merits of JSON vs XML just now, sounds like you're right! Thanks for the help.

  • I'm working on a heavily story-driven RPG project; a major part of the game is characters talking with each other, including branching dialogue trees etc., with the game's total text likely being over 30,000 or 40,000 words.

    What's the best way to implement this in C2? An XML file with every line of dialogue and option in branching conversation each having a single line, which the game then reads from?

    Thanks!

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  • I know that MMF2 users have perfectly recreated the physics engine of sonic the hedgehog in their engine. Presumably people have done similarly for Construct2? Perhaps find one of those and then modify it to your liking.

  • LOL turns out I can't post URLs yet? But if you google "Construct2 sql" you'll see links along the lines of what I found.

  • Hold up hold up hold up -- Construct2 can't connect to an SQL database?

    ...say wha?

    Can it connect to a plain old text file on the web? Because it would be *super* janky, but you could have the database queried separately and have the result of that query output into a .TXT file that Construct2 then reads... but wow, I'm a little bit in shock at that.

    Edit: Looks doable w/ AJAX...

    html5-sql_t60614

    scirra.com/tutorials/296/se ... l-database