thomasmahler's Forum Posts

  • Deadeye: There is no 'problem' with using a buffer sprite if you think about it that way, but it definitely is a somewhat hacky way to do it. Because it's a workaround by definition. We don't have local variables, so we use bufferSprites to simulate local variables = Workaround.

    If you use global variables for things that are global, why shouldn't it make sense to implement local variables that'd apply to layouts only?

    Sure it's good that Aeal has done it, I just wanted to emphasize the point that this IS a workaround and someone who's completely new to Construct (and as it seems a lot of new people are joining now), using buffer sprites to store local variables would probably not be the first thing on their minds - So you have a steeper learning curve, cause you need to know this workdaround in order to make use of a local variable.

    Maybe I'm a little too worried about this, but I've seen this same thing happening with Maya, where Alias (and now Autodesk) started explaining workarounds to their users that at first seemed perfectly fine, but once you start repeating this method over and over again, you'll end up with a huge chunk of workarounds for things that could be implemented natively, so that it would actually make a lot of sense. If you always know 10 workarounds for various tasks, good for you, but in an application that's decidedly non-techy, it's probably not what you want to do looking forward.

    Again, I'm not out to piss on anyones boots or introduce egos here, I just want the app to grow into the right direction. Maybe the way I see it is bullshit as well, but I do think that this is a clear case of "Hey, it'd be cool to have this feature natively in Construct, so we don't have to use a workaround all the time!"

  • Do not want it. This is just another source of data (we have PVs, Hash Tables, Arrays, Global Variables at the moment, it's much enough). And it'll take some more ACE entries.

    Wow. I won't ever understand this idea. Just because there are workarounds for a problem doesn't mean that the problem is fixed (and your suggested workarounds are far from being as convenient as a local variable).

    Say you have certain effects that will only apply to a level (layout) and that you'd like to take control of by using a variable - since you might not want to use a global variable for every single level you build (the bigger the games become that we build in Construct, the more painful it'll be to do everything with gvs), and you want to keep the game logic 'logical' (maybe so that someone else could understand it as well) a local variable would be perfect.

    We had a similar argument on the chat yesterday as well. There's this notion here that the solution to a problem (if a feature doesn't work or the app isn't yet feature complete or production ready) is not that important if there's already a workaraound available.

    I think that it's very short sighted to rely on your users using workarounds for problems. I've seen that over the years happening with complex 3d apps, where some things are now really hard to learn for students, cause they just don't get the workaround that was introduced 3 years ago to 'solve' a problem that was never fixed because it would've been too complex to do at the time. So since the problem was 'somewhat solved', the developer never went back to solve it properly - probably because fixing bugs isn't sexy on release lists.

    Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean it's practical. Construct, just as 3d applications, is (going to be) a complex piece of software that a huge chunk of people with no technical background will use to create amazing stuff - and that's the beauty of it. But the more you ask them to use workarounds that often need you to think in very technical terms, the more you alienate users that are probably more interested in just making their art come to life.

  • It certainly has. But are our NPCs really that much smarter now? In Mario, their AI was based on a simple loop - walk, if you hit a wall, turn around and walk some more, Repeat.

    In Oblivion, each character has certain tasks that he's been given based on the time in the game - and you can talk to them, so they'll tell you different things. If you attack them and drain a certain amount of their hp, they'll attack you. But is that it?

    I can take Oblivion as a good example of how AI can utterly fail:

    In the Dark Brotherhood storyline, there's a quest where you have to kill all your comrades. They're all in a multi-room cave, separated by doors. So, I started the quest and did this: One guy was at the lunch table, eating an apple.

    So I thought this'd be a good time to kill him off. Nobody else was around and that guy was peacefully chomping his apple, which meant that it would've taken him at least a couple of seconds to get into his combat mode to fight back - enough time to let a shitstorm of fireballs rain on his head. That's exactly what I did and it worked beautifully. He was still eating his apple as I started to firefuck his brains, dealing major damage. A couple of seconds later he lay dead on the table.

    Nice, I thought! One man down - Only three more to go.

    At that second, another comrade came in - apparently he was hungry, too. My first thought was: "Shit, now he's gonna see what I just did to his buddy and he's gonna kill me" (I'm talking about the fat, armored Orc) - But, thankfully, he didn't care much about the corpse and his fried brain being splattered across the table. So he went to the cupboard, took out a piece of cheese and rested his arse at the table as well, peacefully eating it while his buddies brain was still smoking.

    That's the problem with open world games - as a developer, it's impossible to create events for every single situation that might happen in the game that the player might do - You already need dozens of events for each character to make them believable, it's currently impossible to keep the believability if you have a couple of hundred NPCs to deal with.

    I believe we'll have AI Engines in the future - just like Physics engines like Havoc became mighty popular, having an engine that'd somehow deal with that shit and that could be implemented into various other engines while not losing a ton of performance would be great. But right now, all of the open world games are filled with puppets, mindless idiots instead of something that could fool me as human beings.

    Fable 2 is another great example, cause it's a game that was just released. The population there just doesn't cut it. I'd rather center the game around one little town with 10 citizens that really could be believable rather than simulating a whole country with 500 citizens that are all stupid as shit.

  • Too late. Now we want to see you spoon!

  • I think you should look at that for a theme:

    Always LOVED this shit for Worms

  • Okay - I'm trying to genuinely find something out here: I never understood why Achievements took off like that. Like, I never cared about Achievements at all, doesn't matter what platform we're talking about. As Microsoft first announced achievements, I thought you'd get something (like Microsoft Points) if you achieve a certain thing in a game - but that obviously wasn't the case, so it's just a value that's either 0 or 1, locked to your account. If you would've been able to gain like 400 MSPoints if you play the game for 100 hours, I would've at least understood what the fuzz is all about, but right now it's a 'virtual achievement'.

    I mean, exp systems and levels and stuff aren't anything different (well, although they do have a direct effect on you in the game), I just wanna know what the achievement hunters feel when they're trying to become perfect at a game by getting every single achievement there is - why do you do it? What's appealing about it? Do you really feel like it adds re-play value? Would you think less of a linear game that doesn't have achievements?

    I never really cared for HighScores either. Developers used to include highscores in a sort of agenda for every 8 and 16bit game, but they seldom had any meaning - I think Achievements are probably the improved version of HighScores.

  • personally i think it looks best in motion -- seeing the air move like that (and air movement also has gameplay implications) and the surfaces abstracted. it's like a crazy impressionist painting that you move around in. it's obviously not going for realism.. it's more dream-like. video compression may effect how it looked -- i had downloaded and watched the HD version. i probably don't want every game to have that aesthetic (i'm not saying it's the defacto, bar raising, new standard for all games to mimic), but i do like to celebrate new and interesting game concepts.

    That's what I was thinking. I didn't care much for the screenshots, since you can already do a lot of that stuff with just textures. But when the thing moves and the whole look is basically based on Post Processing Effects (which seems to be the big thing now, let's just look at Killzone 2), it truly becomes beautiful.

  • the point of one hour compos are to see what ppl can make in a single hour, its fun, thats the point.

    we could have a one week thread, but that would be apart from this.

    the point here is to see what ppl can do in a very limited amount of time under constraints, it creates alot of cool and funny stuff.

    Certainly, I don't think anyone meant that the one thing would rule the other out - 1 hour competitions are great, but it'd also be cool to have stuff where users have a bit more time to not just see what they can do with their current skills, but where they're forced to put some thoughts into design and see what they could come up with if they'd have a couple of days.

    Competitions in general could be very fruitful. Depending on whatever task is given, a realistic timeline could be set.

    Only having 1 hour competitions would suck and only having 3 day competitions would suck as well, so let's make a salad. And put some dressing on, is what I'm saying!

  • 39) Aeal already asked for this yesterday on the chat, but so that it won't be forgotten:

    Layout Variables would be awesome. I want to set certain variables that only get triggered on a certain layout - that'd really help making the layouts come to life with events without having to clutter the whole project with tons of global variables.

    In general, I think for bigger games we sorta have the problem that global variables aren't really all that organized in the system right now. It's just a huge fucking list. It'd probably be cool if we could create a higher level organizational layer to the global variables, like folders. Create a system folder with its set of variables, a combat folder with it's set of variables, etc. - that we could then trigger through actions. For a typical adventure where you'd have tons and tons and tons and tons of global variables otherwise, this would really help keeping things nice and tidy.

    Aaaand:

    40) Being able to give objects a 'Trigger only once' attribute. Like, in a runtime, there are various things I'd only EVER want to do ONE single time throughout the whole game and not repeat it once I re-enter the layout. That's a bit of a bitch to do right now, cause I'd always have to set variables and use them as conditions or I'd have to come up with some other clever idea like using hash tables or whatever and that's still sorta crappy in terms of organization.

    If we'd have an adventure game where you could set an event to only happen once EVER, it'd make things a lot simpler.

  • I hope poeple from TIGsource would recognize this as much as GM and MMF

    Give it some time. Construct still has some obstacles to overcome, but eventually it'll blow Game Maker and MMF away.

    I think the controller system would be the next big thing to tackle - the easier it becomes to do the 'technical stuff', the more designers and artists will start using Construct to create some awesome stuff.

    It'll only take a really big hit being created using Construct.

    If you build it, they will come

  • Portal had a lot of re-play value? Really? It's a puzzler and once you solved the puzzles, you can just go through them again - but you already know the solution.

    Do you mean in terms of speed runs / achievements?

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  • Well, it'd definitely be simpler than Unreal or what you'd expect from any next-gen game (though not by as much as you'd probably think, since the only difference for next gen is that you'd have a high poly source file for normal maps and texture bakes), but you'd still have to have an idea about anatomy, polygons, subdivision surfaces, UVs, rigging, animation, shaders, lighting and rendering and probably post processing to create something like this within todays standards.

    If this is the first time you delve into 3d, go with something different, something easier instead. Creating full production ready characters that are animatable isn't a thing you'll learn in a couple of weeks or even months. 3d isn't very gratifying in that regard, since it'll take you years to become really good and then you'll still sit at least a couple of days or even weeks (next-gen) on a single character asset. I've been doing this for a couple of years now working for some of the biggest developers in the industry and my first solo attempt will be very simplified, but stylish 2d because I literally couldn't afford creating all the 3d assets just by myself. It's not feasible.

    The advantage is that if your character is done, you can play all the animations during render and render it out in one batch from all the perspectives you need, just by setting up a couple of cameras, like you would in real life. So it's possible, but if you're a one man team or an amateur, it's probably not feasible.

  • I haven't really worked with Blender too much, so I can't recommend it directly, but from what I've seen it's grown into a cool package over the last couple of years. Dunno if Blender is easy to learn though, cause the interface was always its weakest point.

    I can't really give you a concrete answer to your question, cause it's like asking some other artist what sorta pencil one should use. I personally still prefer Maya over any other app, mainly because I'm so used to it and because my config is totally configured to my needs.

    The games industry is mostly based on 3ds Max still and I don't think that's gonna change in the foreseeable future - I actually think Max will gain more and more popularity still.

    XSI is also a _very_ cool package which is outstanding in many fields. Still, it isn't being used as much in the films / games industries as Maya / Max. It's pretty big in Asia though.

    If you just want to render out sprites, I guess looking at Blender won't hurt, especially since it won't cost you a thing.

    In general, whatever package you'll learn - 3d under the hood is the same thing everywhere, doesn't matter whatever package you'll decide on. It's like driving a car. Even if you're used to your Honda, you'll have no problem driving with a Mazda if you have to. Sorry for the shitty analogy

    3d CG is still pretty complex and not that easy to learn - Remember, for creating appealing characters you should know a thing or two about anatomy, sculpture, texturing, UVs, you'd basically have to know the whole 3d pipeline, have a good technical understanding and also have a background or a vast interest in the art itself. I studied traditional sculpture and been working as a character artist for a couple of years now.

    Really good character artists that throw out production quality work aren't that easy to find, even for high profile studios, because you really need years of training.

    Sorry if that's not what you wanna hear. If you want to learn a package for your future career, I'd say look at Max, Maya or XSI. If you just want to dabble with 3d and render some stuff out, go with Blender. If you want good character art or 3d art like what I've described, consider hiring a freelance artist for that - that'll still be cheaper than investing years of your own time.

  • I'd also root for a week. Or 3 days or something. But more than 1 hour, since nothing really amazing could happen in an hour, because you don't have enough time to think.

    A challenge where everyone has the same objective would be cool. Like:

    From April 18th to April 25th, create one level / mission of a 2d sneak / stealth game.

    Everyone would have to come up with a simple design that'd have to work technically and from a gamedesign point of view and then we'd just share the caps. That'd be very cool and everyone could learn form one another.

  • I dunno what you're on about, I love how it looks!