thomasmahler's Forum Posts

  • I think the site should be extended so that indies could also sell their games on these sites. One of the problems with indie-development is that people seem to think that indie games have to be free of charge.

    I think we'd make much more progress if indie developers would also be payed for their work - Look at the iPhones AppStore. If there's money involved, developers will hopefully deliver something that's not pure and utter crap and customers will be happy enough spending a couple bucks for something that's really well developed. Look at games like Cave Story - I wouldn't have a problem paying 15-20 bucks for a title like that.

    So maybe you guys should focus on both these things - free games and commercial indie games. For every commercial game there should be a demo version like on XBLA, so people could try everything and decide on what they'd want to spend their money on.

  • Hey guys,

    Small update, didn't have much time. I think moBlur is on in this compile and there should also be music in there now. Man, can't wait til we're able to organize the resources more properly.

    The camera system is also changed.

    http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01.rar

    (careful, it's like over 20 mb with the music and it's set to full-screen 720p)

    Ashley: Full-Screen works if I set it to my LCD TV, but not on my main monitor. It supports 720p, but it tries to switch the resolution and then crashes.

    Controls are the same as ever. Run around with the arrow keys and jump with Z. Up for talking to... boxes

    I currently spend more time with pre-production, design and stuff instead of building it, which is good I guess. But it's a lot of fun to see things building up that way. I love the whole workflow, I can draw the stuff directly on my tablet pc in the native res, send it over to the workstation and rebuild everything in Construct.

    Would be cool if you guys could tell me whether or not it runs better now, using full-screen and 5x moBlur.

    DevS: Btw, when moBlur is on, a lot of the transitions won't work anymore.

  • This is a bit unrelated, but I guess it'd help too:

    Can we get an iTunes-like effect for fading in and out of music tracks? So, a couple of seconds before the current track stops the volume of the track decreases until the volume is at 0 when the track ended. Then, we reverse the same effect for the new track. A couple of seconds into the next track, we raise the volume of it until it's at 100% again.

    That way, we'd not have problems with a track ending - pause - another one beginning, it'd be a much subtler change.

    It'd be cool if we could also have the option for 'ducking', whichs means that we could have a sample in a channel and set the ducking for the main music track. So, if I get to the boss and he says something or starts screaming, the main music track decreases it's volume up until the sample is over. I guess Wikipedia explains it better than I do:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducking

    This'd be cool. It could help making the whole music stuff very dynamic, so we'd enter a boss area, he'd start talking or whatever and the current music track would decrease in volume, thanks to ducking. Then when he'd start attacking, we'd fade into a new music track for the boss fight without any abrupt endings. It'd be like the visual transitions, just for music.

  • To clarify some of the above bugs, they should all be fixed in the next build, so report back then .

    Hmm, now it's even weirder. I click into the parameter textfield and everything goes crazy. If I add a new period and wanna set the text for the parameter and hit enter to accept it, it just says '0' or '-1'.

  • Honest to god, I've used the app for a couple of weeks now but I've never even seen that button

    I always used the list to load up the recent file I've worked with, but I curiously never looked at the bottom of it. For me it's still kind of a weird setup to have the options box there. I'm so used to File - Preferences or Edit - Customize that I'm probably not used to seeing this stuff in other areas.

  • Can we also post a transition request here? Wouldn't it be cool to have a 'fade through black' effect? This effect is heavily used in film or cinematics, where one shot fades to black and the black fades to the new scene (layout in our case) - Right now, you'd have to fake that through a completely black layout that then immediately fades to the next layout, which is kinda funky. Would be cool to have and should be easy enough to pull off I guess

    And while we're at it, why just constraining it to black? The transition should be able to fade through any color we set.

  • The interface/ribbon/hotkey options can be found via the 'Options' button; I've renamed 'Preferences' to 'Construct Preferences' for the next build so it's a bit clearer.

    Uhm. Maybe I'm really blind here, but where is that mysterious 'Options' button? I'm on 98.8 now and I still have the 'Preferences' Entry under file, but the only thing it addresses is AutoSave.

    So where can I set the hotkeys? There's no options button under File and there's nothing in the tabs.

    EDIT: Oh man, now I see it! You meant that little Arrow and then I have to go to 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar' so that I can set hotkeys - I _never_ would've thought of that. Why don't you guys just add this dialog through File - Preferences? It'd be a lot simpler to find and most apps I use use the File - Customize Dialog Box anyway.

  • I run it on Windows 7 64bit without any hickups.

  • Why don't you guys just use Camstudio to make video tuts? It's free, you don't have to write long text and can directly explain what certain features do - and the user won't have to read through tons of text AND sees the effect in realtime.

    Never understood why some people like this way of making tutorials. It's a pain in the nuts.

  • Yeah, that's why it'd be cool to have a system where we could just temporarily hop into a layout, use that layout to make changes or see a cutscene and then invoke an event to hop back to where we were.

  • 23) The Layout system is a little weird.

    I'm currently working on an in-game menu, where you can see your stats, inventory and stuff. Pretty simple, the events are:

    On 'Menu' pressed : System - go to layout 4 + System: Set global variable 'Menu' to 1

    I used Go to Layout and I have to use a number - which is kinda weird, cause if I create an inventory I'll probably just create a layout called 'Inventory' and wanna use 'Inventory' in the 'Go to layout' command and not a number that doesn't even display anywhere

    On 'Menu' pressed + Is global variable 'Menu' equal to 1 : System: Return to previous layout + System: Set global variable 'Menu' to 0

    The problem is that 'Return to previous layout' doesn't go to the 'previous' layout, but to the layout one number ahead of the 'menu' layout. So my 'menu' is on 4 and if I invoke this event it goes to event 3 - And not back to the previous layout.

    So, wouldn't it be cool if we would have a system command that'd say: "Temporarily go to Layout 'String'"?

    So we could have an event that'd temporarily change layouts. And in those temporary layouts, we could set things up so it switches back to the 'previous layout' when another event occures. For a menu, it'd be if the player presses the 'menu' button again.

    This'd be perfect for stuff like an inventory and for cutscenes / timeline events. Or is there a smarter way to do this right now?

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  • I haven't tried it with different compiles yet, but the save / load to/from file option gives me problems already.

    Say I'm on layout 1 and I save. Then I go to layout 2. If I then load, the runtime just freezes. Does that happen to anyone else?

    Also, if I save my game and then load, the music that I had set for the layout doesn't play anymore.

    Devs: Can we set it so that the save / load automatically also saves the state of the music?

  • Hey guys,

    Just a quickie, cause I've been thinking about that:

    Would it be possible at the moment to use Construct for episodic games? Basically, what that means is that the player would have to be able to save:

    1) His character and all of his stats.

    2) The choices he made during the game (example, could be a global variable: Did player kill NPC X? Yes / No).

    3) Options he set in the Options Box, like resolution, full-screen, brightness, camera options, etc.

    4) Whether or not he has completed this episode.

    as a file, so it could then be loaded for the next episode (which would be a different exe file, basically a new game that just uses the old save file to keep going).

    Is it possible to determine what events / stats will go into the save file and can we somehow set Construct to be able to load in the file and read all the data in it, even if it's a new compile / a new episode?

    I think Construct could be an awesome testbed for stuff like that and it'd be great if we could release episodic content like that without the player losing all the hard work he put into it.

  • Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode? Where's the new episode?

    Just thought I should sum up what we're all thinking.

  • I don't think those figures accuretly convay how good that game is, it's just there arent that many games to choose from or compete with yet. Every one will be rushing to make iphone games now and the market will become saturated. These people making big money simply got there first, and in my opinion that ship is already sailing.

    It doesn't, but it shows that there's a market for small development teams to push out great games and actually getting them out to people without having to come up with a ton of financial backing first - which is awesome. So, I don't see where this ship should sail. I don't think it's a good idea to quickly create crappy games just to make a quick buck, but I do love what Apple has done for indie developers.

    I think what we'll see in the future now is that all those crappy iPhone games that aren't even worth 2 dollars will quickly fade away, because there will be a ton of great games that actually are well produced and are a lot of fun and they'll be created by teams of 3-5 people instead of 15-30 people, which actually marks a paradigm change when it comes to game development.

    Personally, I hate how we split the market right now, with casual (read: shitty, "basic" games that you could also play through flash in your webbrowser) and hardcore (read: "play it safe" productions, sequels, big budgets, etc.) games - We can now do simpler stuff in shorter timeframes and focus on core gameplay issues that weren't fixed in the hardcore department yet cause it would've been too risky to experiment. We can experiment more with story and gameplay and even release small games as prototypes to bigger productions, just to see how people would like this or that direction. And all of that is pretty exciting.