untune's Forum Posts

  • Hi all. I've been working on a little test to get a multi layered character to move around. The torso faces the mouse and the legs are supposed to move logically in relation to it. Problem I've hit all of a sudden (this is very messy and unfinished, be warned) is that the 'mouselook' that orientates the torso seems to just stop if the pointer is static. It works for a few seconds while you move around then after that, it only reorientates if you move the mouse. Something I've missed?

    Any help would be appreciated. Also any suggestions on where to improve or make this more efficient would be massively appreciated.

    Try leaving the mouse alone in one spot then using WASD to walk round it and eventually it stops rotating.

    http://www.mediafire.com/?67qonmzz3p0ascc

    Cheers

  • This looks fantastic... is it some kind of mesh? What's the computational overhead like when you drop it into a game?

    Really nice work, looking forward to seeing it develop

  • I really enjoyed this game, it feels really solid and well put together, and I really liked the top hat

    I agree on the power up bar feeling a bit distracting, I kept seeing it as part of the scenery at some points, perhaps make it fade when it isn't in use?

    Don't suppose we'll be seeing a platform engine cap based on this will we? Haha

  • I managed to get the 'legs' functioning nicely, it sortof works like an enhanced version of smooth 8 way movement now.

    The next challenge is going to be interesting... what I want is to have the torso always look at the mouse pointer. That part is simple, I've already put it in. The more complicated bit is to orientate the legs after a certain rotation.

    If you think about your body, you can turn your upper body about 90 degrees before you have to move your feet and change orientation completely. This is what I'm trying to emulate - the upper body will hit a certain angle then the legs will move to compensate.

    The way I have my legs set up is using a single sprite with one angle (default 0, right). I borrowed Intrepids's cap on rotation to test this out and have edited it to a point where it uses a new system. A second object is used to set the outright orientation while the legs smoothly work round a circle to match the angle. WASD keys are assigned a number - meaning that they can be added/subtracted to give unique numbers for each direction. This allows diagonal movement aswell. So when you press W for example, the second object looks directly at the vector 0, -1 (vertically up) and the legs will then smoothly rotate to face upwards from whichever direction they were previously facing. This is done by having events for each number (which is stored in a private variable in the leg sprite) which tell it what action should happen.

    It's still in a simple stage but here's a cap so it might be easier to understand. I think I'm still running .91 and not the latest unstable, so it should be ok for most.

    http://www.mediafire.com/?dv67suhj1bp145p

    If anyone can suggest ways to make this more efficient (it looks rather messy to me) or any theories on implementation I'd love to hear them

  • Oh yeah, I just thought it was good practice to use it in any custom (or rather non-behaviour based) movement in Construct?

  • Sorry to resurrect this one, but I thought it was worth mentioning Reaper

    http://www.reaper.fm/

    An absolutely fantasic DAW and probably the best I've used, it's not strictly free but it uses a nag screen if I'm not mistaken - a university lecturer told me it doesn't strictly imply any limitations. Still, it has a great audio engine, can use VST's, has full MIDI support and tons of great features

  • This is a really useful piece of code!

    Might I also suggest that you change the '30' in your events to a private variable (I just called it Rotate Speed while playing around with the cap) and then you can quickly fine tune the speed at which your sprite rotates - with 1 being immediate rotation and larger values delaying it.

    Oh and wouldn't something need to be scaled by delta time here?

  • All I really need is a variation of the 8 directional movement behaviour, except I also need it to rotate 180 degrees rather than just flip... so much maths

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  • Cheers newt, that's the kindof thing I was thinking, only problems with this method are that it doesnt work for diagonals (so if you hold W and D you don't always face northeast) and it appears to sometimes rotate 270 one way when it could go 90 the other! Haha

  • Just going back to this... is there an efficient method of rotating a sprite (not just setting a direct angle, but actually making a quick spin) to one of four or more set angles?

    So for example if your sprite (from above) was facing left and you press the down arrow he'll quickly turn 90 deg anticlockwise, then pressing the up arrow would make him spin 180 deg anticlockwise so that he was facing upwards, etc...

  • Good shout, I've considered the possibility of having two versions of every sound but the inherent problem with that is that you can't have a perfect crossover point and it'd probably have a negative effect on the overall sound quality. Plus it'd double the size of your media! I think using real time DSP is a great feature of modern games and I think sound is often overlooked...

    Even a plugin that gave you a little more control of the dynamics of sound would be a great feature, I tihnk

  • Also it'd be great to have access to DSP effects such as reverb, as well as filters, to create some unique environmental audio effects...

    XAudio2 appears to have this functionality, can Python access it?

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.directx_sdk.ixaudio2voice.ixaudio2voice.setfilterparameters%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

  • Another new topic

    I'd like a bit more control over sound and specifically I'd like to be able to apply filters to different sounds, that way as a sound source got further away, not only could it get gradually quieter and pan, but a high pass could be applied to remove the lower frequencies...

    I know this can't be done with Constructs sound support but what are the alternatives? Python?

  • If it's just simple maths questions like addition and multiplication then it'd just be a case of taking the values and comparing the expression to the value that is in the text box when the button is pressed.

    I've not got construct installed atm so can't really throw anything together but I imagine this is really simple to do if you use a couple of text objects to display your numbers... but of course it depends how complex the whole thing needs to be, a more detailed description of what you have in mind will be useful to anyone who might help

  • Hi all,

    I've been pondering creating a top down view adventure type thing, and thought it might look smoother using the technique of having the legs and torso as separate objects, allowing the mouse to be used to free-view while the legs can move in WASD directions or whatever. Seen it used in a few flash games and it looks nicer than having a bunch of clunky animations which would only be more time-consuming.

    Anyways, the legs would obviously have to follow a few rules (rotating along with the torso when they hit a certain point for example).

    I've had a search around but can't find anything on the subject - does anyone know a good way to implement this? It may have even been done before but I couldn't find anything when I did a search, so any ideas would be great

    Cheers