thomasmahler's Forum Posts

  • And I was the person Rich talked about

    Gee, I also didn't know about this. And the png transparency issue is an issue since I think everyone's using pngs. Smaller filesizes, alpha channel and a lossless look -> Feature Request!

    Oh, and someone in the chat talked about a hotkey editor - But I can't seem to find it now. If I go to file - preferences, I only get AutoSave in the prefs. A Hotkey editor to setup keys for, say, Run Layout would definitely be helpful.

  • Okay, I added it to the bug tracker. Thought this'd probably be a known issue or something.

  • Hmm, weird, I get a crash if I try to set my project to work in full-screen. I checked whether or not Construct would crash with other projects set to full-screen at the same res, but they seem to run fine.

    So I wonder what could cause the crash? The error I get is not very descriptive:

    "An unexpected error occurred and the application was terminated."

    Is there any option I may or may not set in order for the game to work in full-screen? It crashes when I'm previewing the game in the editor as well as when I created the exe - the runtime just doesn't even pop up.

  • Gotta love this community, this is pretty much exactly what I want

  • Hey guys,

    Just thought we could ramble about this topic. I'm currently still sorta doing pre-production for a personal project, trying to figure out the visual style and how the whole thing could feel like and one of the important aspects to tackle is the camera / scrolling system.

    So... I guess everyone here knows Cave Story, right? If not, you can download it here:

    http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/downloads_1.php

    What I like about its camera system is that it's not just fixed to the player sprite - it's dynamic and has a nice little drag effect. I like that effect, it's not driven to the point where it can become annoying, but it adds some dynamic, as if the camera tries to follow the character and has to readjust a bit, it makes the whole thing feel a bit more fluid.

    So, I've seen some camera threads here already but never quite understood the logic behind their systems. My idea is that you create a camera sprite that is linked to the player sprite and set the system to scroll to the camera sprite - then, if we'd give the camera an expression that emulates this 'drag' effect (so it always drags a bit behind the player sprites movements), we should have what we want, right?

    Any thoughts on how to solve this in the simplest, most streamlined way? The effect should be subtle enough to not be annoying to the player, but just to make the whole game a tad more dynamic.

  • Heh we should make a list of 'common game design questions' which we can provide simple 'event-wise methods' of achieving stuff in the simplest way possible...enemy 'waves' and spawning positions in general is a good topic to add!

    Absolutely. That'd make it a lot easier to learn the whole deal. The interesting thing about games is that, as an artform, everyone copies from one another anyway, trying to better what the other studio did wrong. So a lot of the stuff that people would come up with will be very similar and it doesn't make sense if 10.000 people all need to solve the same problem 10.000 times.

    Video Tuts on this would be neat, so people could learn in an even quicker fashion. There are services like youtube and vimeo now, so why not making full use of em?

  • This is awesome, thanks a lot David!

  • No Pixel Shaders. Every scene element is just a png image at its source, so it's the image with an alpha channel - all of that put together in the scene. And some of the elements are quite large (the format of the project is 720p), which is probably why things slow down.

    The idea is simply that I can basically concept and design everything in Photoshop and then quickly put all the layers into seperate png files and layout them again in Construct.

    I haven't yet created tiled grass and so on for the ground, so the grass patches are 3-4 grass 'chunks'.

    The motion blur version is the same thing but moBlur added in the global project properties. Nothing else, nothing fancy - but I really like the moBlur effect with that design, it gives it a sorta dreamy look.

    Have you guys tried both layouts? You can use the tab key to switch between layouts, the second one has scrolling in it - a good way to test if the scene slows down.

    Oh, btw, is there a way to check how much fps we get for the runtime? That'd be helpful for debugging and making sure that the thing runs even on older hardware.

  • They released an alpha now - I guess you devs should take a look at it, just to see what they're doing and maybe it'll give some inspiration. Maybe they solved a few problems in a smarter way or whatever.

    In any case, I think the games they ship with it as examples are [nerd mode on] boner-shrinkers[nerd-mode off], especially compared to how nice their site looks. But we'll see, since their target market are iPhone apps, it could still be an interesting app.

    Ashley: Not sure that's true. The iPhone market may not be the biggest mobile market out there (yet), but there are a lot of geeks, tech-fans and so on that actually buy games, which makes it a very viable market. Here's an interesting article:

    http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/s ... phone.html

    His demo was downloaded 2.4 mio times, the full version was sold 320k times so far.

    40k a day, 600k a month - That means that small teams could actually make a living by kicking out high quality games. And the iPhone is an interesting piece of hardware, so I'm pretty sure you could create some amazing stuff on it.

  • Thanks guys, so I'll just turn off MoBlur. Damn shame though, I love the effect.

  • So maybe it really only has to do with ATI cards? Cause your x1900 should be faster than a GeForce 6 I guess. And your Core Duo is definitely faster than the Pentium D.

  • Okay, didn't wanna fill up the Screenshot thread, so here goes:

    <img src="http://thomasmahler.com/images/corrupted_01small.jpg">

    I've been testing the older build for a bit on a couple of machines now. The moBlur version is doggone slow on my AMD CPU, ATI GPU Tablet PC. If I start the non-moBlur version, it's sorta playable, but it's at around 20fps.

    It works pretty great on every non-laptop machine I tried though - even on really old Pentium Ds with old Geforce 6 GPUs, so I'm not sure if it's just the way I build it that eats so much performance on some systems or if there are some effects that just slow down the performance on some machines like hell.

    If you guys could try it out on your machine and tell me what specs your machine has and how it runs, it'd really help figuring out how to improve the performance.

    Here's the moBlur version:

    http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01old.exe

    Non-moBlur:

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

    I'll target a higher-end, 720p version, but I definitely want it to be playable on 3-4 year old boxes.

  • Alright, can you guys simply re-download it and tell me if it's faster now? I turned off the motion blur, turned on the 'Run without PS' option and fixed that freaking scrolling bug in the second layout (the player model was set to the background layer and not to the base layer).

    I don't have an older machine at hand right now, would be interesting to know if it's just the motion blur that kills the performance or if there's something else at work. I also capped the res at 720p now.

    Edit: Oops, I'm totally hi-jacking this thread. I should probably open up my own, so we don't fill up this one

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  • I post a version without moBlur later on - It's weird that its so slow for you guys, I don't have the slightest lag, would be interesting to see if it's just the moBlur.

  • Really? It's super smooth for me. I have motion blur set to 10x for this, maybe that's the problem? I could imagine that some older gpus have trouble with that.