Velojet's Forum Posts

  • ... There's absolutely no way I can keep making games with such a discrepancy plaguing my screen! ...

    Hmmm. What's your name?

  • Good riddance I say - and support the action by the police in my country (New Zealand) who've now got this slob behind bars only a few km from where I'm writing this. Who really wants to fund his obscene lifestyle?

  • Sorry for a newby question ... i want to know how to trigger his walk animation and his jump. ... It's a platform game. Please help

    Have you worked through my Building a platform game - a beginner's guide tutorial, DekuBackPack? You should find your questions answered there.

    If not, just ask.

    And never apologise for a newby question ;)

  • I am so happy C2 isn't a an scripting program. ... Traditional programming should stay for developing applications and such. For making games, tools like C2 are, in my opinion the future.

    I couldn't agree more - and I speak as a programmer/analyst with over 25 years' experience (C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, JavaScript ...).

  • Marvellous idea, 7Soul - and attractive implementation. Thanks greatly for sharing!

  • The preview post button always shows me "There is nothing to preview" message.

    Yes, I've also found the 'Preview' button (right below me now in the Reply editor) useless (Windows 7/IE9).

    None of those are big issues and I can live with all of them just fine.

    Yes, just a minor annoyance and I've lived with it since joining.

  • parsed: "I'm torn between Unity3d, HTML5, and Scirra construct".

    In fact, Construct 2 currently exports to HTML5, so the two are not mutually exclusive. Having set out to write games for HTML Canvas using raw JavaScript, I can tell you that Construct 2 makes it an order of magnitude easier and faster!

    Welcome and enjoy!

  • parsed: I'm the writer of the

    Building a platform game - a beginner's guide tutorial that Kyatric has pointed you to.

    I started out with the idea of adapting the Platform School tutorial for Construct Classic that you refer to, but I found that there were so many differences between the two Constructs that it really seemed best to start afresh.

    You'll see that I've asked for comments about what you'd want to see in future instalments of my tutorial, so I hope you'll let me know.

    In the meantime, I'm glad to know that there are people like you who see the need for a platform tutorial!

  • Weishaupt: You are indeed a nice guy and you are conducting a very civil and tactful conversation. Metal_X definitely doesn't speak for me.

  • Weishaupt: Arima's words are very wise. Frustration comes with the software development territory. We welcome the frustrating challenges for their intellectual stimulation and for the motivation they provide to develop better software.

    Let your frustration drive you to isolate this bug and then be able to say for certain whether it's in your code or in the Construct 2 engine. Until you do that, it's premature (and yes, unreasonable) to ask the Scirra developers to help in your hunt.

    Use the excellent debugging advice that Ashley and Arima have given you. Effective debugging strategies are a vital part of the toolbox of any software developer.

    Happy hunting!

  • Yann: Many thanks for your positive feedback.

    Yes, your code is semantically the same as the Construct 2 code. But that's not what I'd do in JavaScript. Instead, I'd write:

    var instance = new ObjectType();
...
instance.favorite = true;

    ... which is both semantically and syntactically different. There's no longer any dependence on the condtional test of an instance variable. That's why I called the Construct 2 solution a workaround.

    In fact, I'd go further and call it a kludge, and like all kludges it has a real downside. In this case, it's that the assignment depends on the value of a variable, which is always vulnerable to change. There's no such problem with a named instance, of course - the name is the identifier of its essence and simply can't be changed.

    newt: I'm sorry. I don't get your point.

  • Kyatric, Yann: Thanks immensely for so patiently and promptly sharing your knowledge! You've helped to clarify a number of issues concerning object instances.

    So what have I learnt? (Please tell me if I've got any of these conclusions wrong!):

    In order for an event that's dependent on a system condition to affect only a particular object instance that's chosen in advance by the coder at build time, we need to have some means of picking that instance (other conditions can be filtered for particular instances as explained in the Manual). Such system conditions can occur when a game is replayed, or a new level is reached, or a certain time has passed, and we then need to reset the state of a particular instance (e.g. the centre cat in our demo).

    Construct 2 offers no way of naming individual object instances at build time (unlike OO languages). (It might be thought that UIDs could be directly used for this purpose, but their value is not known till runtime, so can't be used when building). There are workarounds to ensure that such a system condition will affect only a particular instance:

    • One workaround is to set up an event to save the (runtime) value of an instance UID in a global variable, and then use that variable to pick that particular instance.
    • Another workaround is to add to an object type an instance variable that can be given a different value for each instance, and then be used to pick a particular instance. This is what we all seem to be agreed on, since each of our demos has the same 'Reset' event:

    <img src="http://www.millercrawford.com/images-offsite/construct2/reset.png" border="0" />

    Again, please tell me if this doesn't make sense - or if there's some simpler way of doing this!

  • Thanks again, Kyatric and Yann. Shock bis wins on conciseness!

    At first glance though, it does indeed look as though each cat requires that additional Boolean instance variable that I gave it ('colour' in this example) so that, when resetting, it can be used to pick the centre cat and set its 'favourite' Boolean to 'true' (having reset all the others to 'false').

    Out on another job now, however, so I'll study your demos more carefully tonight and come back with further comments.

  • Here're a couple of demos of my own. First, a reminder of what I'd like to do:

    To have a means of identifying each particular cat at the point of placing them on the layout.

    I can do that in JavaScript (or any OO language) by giving each a unique instance name e.g. 'centreCat'.

    I can't see any way of doing that in Construct 2. That's why I call any way of achieving the same outcome a 'workaround'.

    This capx shows one workaround (following suggestions by Kyatric and Yann) - and one example of why I need to have a means of identifying a particular cat at the point of placing it on the layout. (Thanks again to Kyatric for his graphical interpretation of my verbal description!)

    When the game is reset (e.g. when the game is over and we want to play it again), I need to revert to making the centre cat (black) the favourite, by setting its 'favourite' Boolean instance variable to 'true'.

    Hence my need to be able to identify that cat at the point of placing it on the layout. And hence this workaround:

    Give each cat an additional Boolean instance variable: 'colour'. When resetting, use the 'colour' Boolean to pick the centre cat and set its 'favourite' Boolean to 'true' (having reset all the others to 'false').

    This capx shows another workaround (following suggestions by Ashley and Yann): At the outset, I save the centre cat's UID in a global variable 'CentreCatFavourite'. When resetting, I pick that cat instance with its UID and set its 'favourite' Boolean to 'true'.

    Thanks again for bearing with me!

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  • Kyatric Lovely work ! Mille remerciements !

    I'm going to have a close look at your demo later today (8:20am here in NZ, and I have to go out on a job now).

    Your demo capx gives me a much better way of explaining my query and then going on to look at possible solutions (including yours, of course).

    I really appreciate the attention and effort you're giving to this issue.