tunepunk's Forum Posts

  • damn,

    pretty much every sprite in my game, bar the bullets and hud, are in a single family. Can be 100s at a time

    I will have a look tonight.

    Yeah i checked on of my projects as well, and got quite a nice performance boost by removing families. Every single Level sprite that was going to be Z-Ordered was in a family called Z-Order. 100's of instances.

    On my mid/low-end windows phone framerate jumped from 45-50 to constant 60fps now, and seemed to help a little bit with stuttering as well.

    I bundled all Level objects in the same sprite using animations and frames instead of using multiple objects and a family. I always wondered why my game was getting slower and slower as I added more static level sprites. Turns out it was because they were in families.

    I'm going to do the same for all my pickups, and other things as well that has a fairly high instance count.

  • I remembered this mentioned in one of the blog posts, and found this to be one of the most interesting future plans.

    https://www.scirra.com/blog/204/the-fut ... -3-runtime

    I'm just curious and want to know more about what's planned for this and what we can do with it. One of my main problems is that I really suck at coding but have several plugin ideas i wanna make, but don't know how to do them in javascript. I can do them with events but this modular idea sounds really good.

    Is there any design specifics about this that you can share at this point? Or at least a little bit more info about it, and how it's planned to work?

    I'm wondering if you can basically select a set of events, bundle it in some way, and add parameters for reuse in other projects, or shared with others? It seems like a really awesome feature that I want to know more about.

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  • Ashley

    Just out of curiosity i ran the C3 performance test quad issue with and without Families as well.

    Without family I was getting about 185000 sprites.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/q8ethv0ibpm0s ... y.png?dl=0

    With families i was getting 118000 sprites.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/kr8s8h3nd4abr ... y.png?dl=0

    If most or all of your ingame sprites are included in one or several families, you could be looking at a quite significant performance drop. Resources that could be used to make the game better or have more fancy effects and gameplay mechanics, or just running smoother and better on less powerful devices.

    Show's quite a big decrease in performance when using a large number of instances in families. Families is such a nice and frequently used feature in most projects so I think it definitely deserves a bit of attention as it can be a major resource hog. Even for C2, and not as a C3 runtime exclusive update.

  • Due to these recent findings I did some quick tests on an old mobile project:

    *Removed all static level objects from families. Instead bundled different objects in the same sprite by using Animations, and frames, and got a quite significant reduction to CPU time (Engine). (Mostly noticeable on mobile)

    Conclusion:

    * Don't place sprites with high object count in Families, as it will impact CPU usage.

    * Families most suitable for low object count sprites, like enemies and pickups, etc.

    * Reducing the amount of instances in a family will reduce CPU usage under "Engine".

    Maybe that would help some people with performance in large projects, and mobile projects on lower-mid range devices, until it has been looked at in a future update.

  • Thanks for looking in to it.

    Yeah 100.000 static objects, is not that bad. But games are far from static, so losing a big portion of CPU time on something that isn't doing anything, or and is even invisible isn't really optimal just to use the family feature. Hopefully you can find and optimize this in future runtime updates.

    And as he said. As CPU time goes up Framerate drops.

    On a side note there seems to be no difference if you use 1 familiy or 15 families in the project. The increased CPU usage seems to depend on whether you're using any families at all. 0 families no CPU time increase.

    Edit: Or rather. 0 objects in families. No increase. the more instances that are in any family the CPU time increases. Anywhay, this is quite good to know, it's better to use families for low count objects like monsters etc, and not so much for building blocks and level sprites, that can get high numbers quickly.

  • I just tested this as well. If the sprite is member of No families the CPU is 0% (Engine) even if there is 50000 in the layout. As soon as you start adding them to families The CPU usage goes up.

    I'm just guessing that somewhere in the background, there is something updating every tick with what family a sprite belong to. Maybe some SOL list or something? I have no other explanation for this. Something in the runtime that keeps track of what families a sprite belongs to?

    As you can't change members of family in runtime, I'm not sure why this is something that needs to be updated every time though (if it's that)?

    For large projects i think this can be critical, or even some mobile games, as you have a lot less CPU power to play with.

    Edit: Or if you take his project file. Run the debugger with the families. It shows for me 10% CPU usage.

    When you delete all the families. Run debugger again without any families in project, the CPU usage is 0.5% for the same amount of sprites in layout.

    This kind of boggles me, as I'm a heavy user of families in many of my projects.

  • I play around with C3 once in a while, and it seems like most critical bugs are dealt with at the moment. Seems fairly stable, and not much new coming in to the bug tracker. It has cooled down. I had no problem moving over some of my projects to C3 as I don't really rely much on 3rd party plugins, and I really like that I can just fiddle around at work when I have time over, so having C3 on the web, seems like very nice thing for me at least.

    More payment options, standalone etc I guess will come sooner or later, but seems like they have more important stuff in the pipeline first.

  • I see one big problem with translating system expressions. If you're asking for help on the forum (which is english only) providing screenshots, or expression snippets, nobody could help out unless they knew the language.

    And besides that Translating basic expressions are not going to help non-english speakers in their future endeavors of developing games as I don't know of any language that translates their syntax commands to local language. So not really a good idea...

    Keeping it english would probably be a good things even for the young ones as they learn a few english words along the way.

  • Thanks for the info. Yeah I doubt many people would actually spend months to develop those kind of plugins, unless there was an economic incentive to do so (selling the plugins), or if a particular studio was using Construct for their development, and need those kind of tools for own inhouse use.

    It's nice to see that some if is being considered, and in the plans though.

    Although in C2 trying out the Q3D plugin earlier i did notice that this particular plugin was able to draw things on the layout. I think it was a 3D box, representing the camera, or a lightsource (can't remember exactly). Was this one of those special cases or is this functionality somewhere in the SDK? Ashley

    Nice to see that bug reports are getting less frequent now so hopefully you can focus more on adding more features, goodies, and other awesome stuff.

  • I was just curious if there's anything any future plans to support plugins that could interact with the editor itself, that could add new features to the editor?

    It would be nice if we could add plugins for ease of life improvements to the editor if there was any ability to do so. Some things I had in mind that would be quite neat:

    * Animation timeline (Similar to Flash/AfterEffects) Good for making cutscenes etc, animating UI elements and other things.

    * Drawing curves/paths/shapes in the layout for objects to follow, or to use as collision boxes/boundaries and or other stuff.

    * More advanced transforms to sprite objects. Bend, skew, taper, tilt etc etc.

    * Null objects/pivots, and object child/parent structure.

    * Simple 3D transforms, similar to CSS transforms.

    * Layered sprites. Instead of using two separate sprites on top of each other, adding layers within the sprite object would be nice and handy.

    The list goes on, and I have a lot of ideas, that would make C3 even more awesome if the editor itself could be extended as well. So is there any plans for these kind of editor plugins?

  • Cool. Are you working on a plugin or are you doing this with events only?

  • I mentioned C3 because you posted in the C3 section of the forum, but yes it is possible in C2 as well.

  • You could use the different blend modes.

    Check the C3 beginner examples > Blend modes.

    You can then have another image with alpha to mask out the round shape.

    I think destination out or destination in should work well in your case.

  • Probably a bit tricky if you want to use some way to make a circle since we can't really do much with the shape of objects. If you had a cake slize sprite of a few degrees you could probably use that one several times over and over to create a circle Maybe not the best option though, but probably doable. And not sure if it would look good also.

    I would probably go with a sprite animation.

  • When you press the button to change the direction. Start the turning animtion.

    When the turning animation finishes you can set the regular animation, and flipped.

    You can use the "On finished" condition to check when the turning animation has finished.

    Hope that helps.