Tokinsom's Forum Posts

  • As the title says.

    Let's say my player jumps in water so I give its sounds a low-pass filter effect...but my player is also in a large cave so I give its sounds a delay effect as well.

    My player then jumps out of the water aaaaand...I can only remove all the effects, not just the low-pass filter from the water.

    I suppose I could just reapply the delay from the large cave every time my player exits the water but that's not applicable for all cases and I think that would cause a "judder" in the delay effect anyway.

  • As I've mentioned in the earlier posts, "Set Canvas Size" does not affect internal resolution as you are suggesting it does - it merely changes the external resolution but without changing the window size.

    Please take a look at this .gif: media.giphy.com/media/A2OHsceP7gBTRADQvm/giphy.gif

    Or the .c3p itself here: dropbox.com/s/mbe5ma4s677pt0c/Internal%20Resolution%20Test.c3p

    This is what happens when setting the canvas size to 200%, 300%, etc.

    I get the exact same results regardless of fullscreen quality mode or any other project properties / display modes.

    If it is supposed to work how you are suggesting then maybe this is a bug?

  • I think there is some confusion over the terminology here. I'm not talking about window size / canvas size / external resolution, which is all "Set Canvas Size" affects. I'm talking about internal resolution or what is maybe more commonly known as resolution scale, which pertains to rendering quality. It is, admittedly, kind of hard to describe because it's implemented differently in various games and engines. C3 already has it, my only issue is that I have no control over it.

    Please take a look at the images below.

    These are from a C3 project with a 320x180 viewport, in fullscreen, on a 2560x1440 display.

    With low quality fullscreen, the internal resolution stays at 320x180 (100% resolution scale). This results in blurry text and chunky pixels on the rotated object.

    However, with high quality fullscreen the internal resolution is automatically changed to the display's 2560x1440 (800% resolution scale), resulting in ultra crisp text and smoothed-out pixels on the rotated object.

    This is the desired result, but I don't need the internal resolution or "quality" to be quite so high because it can become taxing on the GPU. I would like to limit the internal resolution to something lower like 1280x720 (400% resolution scale), while keeping the external resolution at 2560x1440. This way I get slightly crisper text and smoother movements / rotations, but not quite as much as I would with the full-on 2560x1440 internal resolution. In exchange I get better performance.

    You might be thinking "Well, a 340x180 game should not be using high quality fullscreen anyway" but that is not always true. Many low-res pixel art games these days opt for higher internal resolutions or "high quality fullscreen" because it makes movements & scrolling smoother, and allows them to use text instead of spritefonts. 380x140 was just for the example images anyway, as it makes the difference in fullscreen quality modes very apparent.

    Hopefully this explains the issue well enough. I know I'm not the best at it. I can try to find other references or examples if needed.

  • Hey Ashley

    Thanks for the response. I tried that out but it seems setting the canvas size affects the external resolution regardless of fullscreen quality mode, or whether or not the game is in fullscreen.

    To elaborate - my game has a native resolution of 640x360. On a 4K display with Fullscreen Quality [High], the internal resolution / resolution scale is automatically set to a whopping 6x / 600%.

    I don't think the "fullscreen quality" option should be a simple "high" (automatic resolution scale) or "low" (native) - it should be something the developer can set themselves, or give to the player so they can find an appropriate setting based on their device specs.

    I've been thinking of ways this could be implemented and it could be as simple as adding a dropdown list ranging from 1x - 8x or so with "automatic" as a default to keep the current functionality.

    Is this something you would consider?

  • It seems that setting the "Fullscreen Quality" project property to "High" automatically sets the internal resolution as high as possible based on window/screen size.

    This can vastly improve the visuals of your game, but it can also be very taxing on the GPU for 2k or 4k displays. There are diminishing returns beyond a certain point, anyway.

    Ashley That said, would it be possible to let us set the internal resolution ourselves in order to find a proper balance between visual quality and performance? Ideally this could be turned into an in-game option so players can find that balance themselves. At the very least, an option to cap the internal resolution to a multiple of the viewport size would suffice.

  • I'm not sure if you realise, but scheduled audio does not actually usually work with audio categorised as music. These tracks are normally backed by <audio> elements, which don't support sample-accurate playback - only Web Audio buffers do, which is how audio categorised as sound is played.

    On some platforms for various reasons like compatibility we actually ignore the audio categorisation and play everything as sound anyway (i.e. via Web Audio buffers). I've never seen or heard of any particular negative consequence of doing that, so I think it's fine to do that in your case too if you need sample-accurate playback of music tracks, and audio categorised as sound can be played with unlimited overlap.

    No I was not aware of this, and am now doubly confused. I thought the whole point of audio scheduling was to eliminate the potential 16ms+ "seam" between audio loops (which the built-in loop option is NOT immune to) as well as consistently repeating sounds like in the audio scheduling demo found in the start page. So then, how on earth are you supposed to seamlessly loop music outside of the method I've proposed above?

    As for workarounds, considering this particular game is strictly for desktop PC & consoles (chowdren) would it be okay to put my music tracks in the sound folder and play them as such? I considered this earlier but I thought it would instantly load every music track into memory instead of "streaming" on the fly, but perhaps that's some old web-based C2 logic I'm wrongly applying here?

  • Ashley I've done this before with mixed results and would ultimately consider it a workaround/hack. Having the tail mixed into the start is really obvious in some cases. Also, what of tracks with a one-off intro? If the tail of the looped section is baked into the beginning then you get the tails of both the intro & the loop stacked on top of each other. Alternatively, if the entire track is 1 file with a "loop back point" to skip the intro on successive plays, then that similarly cuts the tail of the looped section. All in all it's a hassle and the results are not perfect nor flexible.

    My composer and I were both excited to utilize audio scheduling and not have to bother with all of that, and everything is already coded with track tags, files, segments, durations, etc. in a JSON file so we can basically structure and loop music tracks however we want, flawlessly and without "tricks". This even allows us to change up song structure on the fly e.g. dynamic boss music based on its remaining health! All we need is the limitation of two identical tracks playing simultaneously to be lifted, and we're golden! I implore you to give it some consideration.

  • Most if not all music tracks will have a "tail" or "remainder" at the end consisting of reverb, delay effects, decay of an instrument, etc. or maybe the composer simply wants some sustain at the end of the track that overlaps the following loop a bit.

    As such, the loop needs to start playing at a specified point shortly before its previous one has ended, resulting in a bit of an overlap. This can't be done with the Audio object's built-in looping.

    However, this can be done with audio scheduling. Problem solved!

    Or so I thought... It appears that Construct doesn't allow you to stack playback of identical music tracks, so when I go to play a new loop just before the end of the previous one (as to not cut off the remainder) it instead replaces the previous loop and...yep, cuts off the remainder.

    This isn't a problem when using 2 different tracks (e.g. having a one-off intro track overlap the beginning of a different, looping track) so I don't understand why we can't also do that with multiple of the same track, unless it's some sort of safety measure to prevent people from doing this on accident (in which case there should just be a parameter to define how many "stacks" or "layers" of the same track can be played simultaneously - this would actually be very useful for sounds!)

    Anyway, hopefully I've explained this well enough. Ashley would it be possible to allow this or add an option to do so? I can file a suggestion if needed. The only workarounds are to have a duplicate of the same music track with a different name and then alternate between the two, or play the music tracks from the sound folder...but obviously neither of those are a good idea lol.

    Tagged:

  • I've been asking this question for years and have never gotten a solid answer, nor has it somehow ever seemed to be of much importance to other users. It's the first instance of an object you ever make, it's the one in the top-most layout, yes it can be changed, no it cannot be changed, etc.

    It's infuriating when you end up with your "default instance" somehow magically inheriting the properties of some random other instance instead of the first one you created, or whichever you want. This not only becomes the one created at runtime, but the one properties are inherited from when placing a new instance in a layout from the project bar.

    I suggested a "make default instance" button years ago but it never happened.

    All this time and I too still don't fully understand the inner workings of it :')

  • Agreed this would be very useful, but not sure if it's possible. Add it to the suggestions platform or tag Ashley?

  • Very useful. I just recently opted for spriteswapping instead of 8+ color replace shaders due to performance issues on many instances, so this might allow me to do that after all.

  • And dictionaries inside a dictionary!

  • I tried construct3.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C3-I-470

    Some of these things have since been fixed, but not the big ones. A "default dark" theme is still missing and would be welcome.

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  • Ah, wonderful! I switched to the stable channel a while ago so I hadn't seen that yet.

  • With the new scene graph feature, I was hoping to be able to assemble a heirarchy of objects in an "object bank" layout, then create that as needed during runtime via a single event.

    For example, an invisible dummy object would be the parent to a bunch of other objects that comprise a pause menu, or perhaps a large complex enemy with multiple parts / unique instances. So "create dummy object" would effectively create my whole pre-assembled pause menu or complex enemy on the fly during runtime, and destroying the dummy would destroy the child objects as well. (Yes, I know containers create / destroy their partnered objects at runtime but this is different.)

    Is this not possible or am I just missing something? It looks like hierarchies made in a layout only pertain to those exact instances.

    I suppose this would be more akin to Unity's prefabs but wasn't that sort of the point with the scene graph feature to begin with?