zendorf's Forum Posts

  • Arima, yes it does seem to be a DirectX vs OpenGL issue. Would be interesting to know how many commercial 2D PC games use OpenGL instead of DirectX these days.

    The integrated HD3000 in my Asus tablet is giving awful performance for my C2 games, even though it has a decent cpu, it all seems to come down to GPU power. The HD4000 is pretty much the standard in most laptops these days...how well does it fare for HTML5 games?

  • Sure, if you have current hardware and a decent graphics card you can get good performance out of C2/HTML5, no question. But I want to cater to a general market that may be running less optimal/slower hardware. I shouldn't expect a potential customer to have good gaming rig just to play a fairly simple 2d game.

    Even though I have several i7 workstations and laptops , I am intentionally doing most of my development on an older centrino laptop(HD 3670) to keep my performance expectations realistic. Since this laptop runs all of my Steam games fines such as Rayman Origins, Limbo, Trine, Botanicula ,etc I know that the hardware is quite capable of running an "indie" style title. If I am struggling to get even a consistent 30fps out of a much simpler C2/HTML5 game (at 720p) under chrome/node webkit I have to question the viability of HTML5 on older hardware.

    I am also testing out a physics based game I made with C2 on my Asus ep 121 tablet(i5 proc and HD3000 gfx) and getting totally unusable results(less than 20fps at best). On my centrino laptop with an old Radeon card it is much better at double that. Still, I do seem to get lots of random slow downs on all my games, and I have massively optimised and stripped them down over time.

    Just getting to the point where I wanted to finish some games and not spend all my time just trying to optimise, hence why I started dabbling in GM and finding I was getting massive performance gains. I haven't had anything drop below 60fps yet on the same hardware. And for what it is worth, I have been trying out other C2 users work to see how the performance/frame rate is and finding the same issues. No doubt HTML5 output from GM or Stencyl will have the same issues.

    Please don't take this as a slight on C2, as it is a joy to work with :) I will continue to use it for games that don't require high performance and don't have physics properties. This will be less of an issue in coming years with higher quality GPU's as standard(Haswell) and more optimisation of HTML5 and browsers in general.

  • Ignoring money, both GM and C2 can be equal performers, with everything depending on the ability of the developer. But for the money that it's worth... yeah C2 is a better bargain.

    Indeed! There seems to be a lot of hate for GM on this forum, but the truth is that they are both great tools and have their own inherent strengths/weaknesses.

    I started out with C2 at the end of last year and I ended up getting so frustrated with poor performance on my platformer that I ended up buying a pro GM license a few months ago. Currently I am developing several games in both applications, so am quite aware of the pros/cons of each.

    GM kills C2 in the performance stakes, since it does native exports. It also benefits from having features such as paths, timelines, scripting, per pixel collisions, debugger, SVN , etc. Wheras Construct is much faster to use and has a more elegant workflow/gui with a nice layering and events system. While using the event sheets is great, at a certain level of complexity I would much rather be scripting it!

    And if C2 had native exe export I probably would have never even tried GM! This is why you are paying so much more for the full studio version of GM, as the standard and pro versions are actually cheaper than C2. YoYo have many more devs than Scirra and most likely most of them work exclusively on the exporters. I would be more than happy to pay an extra few hundred for an exe or apk native exporter for C2!

    For my projects that will be aimed at the desktop/mobile/Ouya market I will mostly use GM and for the web I will use C2. For non-web destinations, C2 is too reliant upon 3rd parties which is too much of a unknown for me at the moment. HTML5 for games will certainly be viable for games in the coming years, but if you want decent performance on older machines and mobile, it just isn't there yet IMO.

    As always, you need to pick the tried and true tool for the job. Like the saying goes...If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every job looks like a nail...

  • Very cool, this will come in handy for backgrounds!

  • I'm glad there is a visible grid now! There are a lot of uses for it (though admittedly fewer for my game <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> ), but I would pick new/improved features over updating the sprite editor any day. There are so many better, free options for graphics creation and manipulation that it seems strange to make it too full-featured.

    I agree with you, just figured that the code for visible grid in the layout could be reused for the sprite editor. I only use the sprite editor for standin graphics when prototyping, but with a bit of dev love here and there, it could be used for finals.

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  • Really nice work man, probably the slickest game I have seen from C2 so far!

    What resolution are you creating the game at? Is the character animated in Flash or a 3D app, as there is a very convincing 3d-ness to him? Loving the graphic/audio design as well...

  • The new visible grid is great and makes a big difference. Would love to see a grid option in the sprite editor as well. It would really help when making low res sprites.

    The sprite editor certainly needs a fair bit of work to get it up to the level of standalone apps, but top of my list would be a tilable option <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

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  • Also, remember that you can export to an .exe via the Node-Webkit option. This is what I usually use when testing a WIP on other computers or to show other people.

  • I was going to post on here that we really need to have a way of globally editing all instances. It is obvious that you can select all instances of an object by left click selecting it in the object/project pane and then adjusting the variables/parameters you need.

    What is not so obvious, is that if you right click an object in the object/project pane (disregard the right click menu that comes up) you can then change any parameter/variable in your whole project!

    It is great to be able to change parameters on either a single instance, all layout instances, or all project instances at will. Gives you a massive amount of control and freedom. Wish I knew about this a few months back :)

    Not sure if this is documented or well known, but hopefully someone else finds this useful <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • I have had similar problems in some of my games when there are large scrollable levels. It can be seemingly quite random slowdowns in framerate that then pickup back again. Haven't really been able to totally pinpoint the source, as sometimes recreating the level and changing object layers has resolved it.

    Seems mainly related to collision detection. For instance, a bullet object that has a collision event on a large scrollable level has caused massive slowdown in chrome/ie10, but when I get rid of this event, the framerate is back to normal.

    Are collision events being calculated for all objects in a layout or just visible ones? I have tried coding it so that it is only seen via " is in layout" but it didn't make much difference. Are collision events more efficient when they are on the same layer, or is this irrelevant?

  • Ooooh Yeah, this would be a massive help! Also having a way to paint the current selected sprite is sorely missed. Maybe by using a modifier key(shift?) and left click dragging in the layout would be great.

  • Just wanted to give a big props to Ashley and Scirra for fixing this issue in the latest beta! It works perfectly now, from the quick tests I have done. This will make a huge difference to anyone creating a platformer.

    I am not used to seeing bugs fixed so quickly in the professional software I use, not even apps that cost 30x what C2 costs. C2 has definitely been the best purchase I have made in a while :)

  • Yikes, comic sans is the last font you would ever want to use :)

    I actually was trying fonts with node-webkit for the first time today to see if I could work it out, and it it worked perfectly. Was cool to see the font displayed in the layout in C2 as well. After following this tute it worked without a hitch:

    scirra.com/tutorials/237/how-to-use-your-own-web-fonts

    Maybe it is the font that you used? Some fonts may be more problematic than others? I just changed my .ttf to a .woff via Font Squirrel using the visitor1 font from Dafont.com:

    dafont.com/search.php

    you could always try this font as test and then go back to your original font.

  • Since I have already posted a similar bug report related to the pin and sine behaviours, I will wait to see what becomes of that. There is obviously a timing issue with behaviours mixed with standard events being calculated on a different tick.

    How deep in the game engine this code is, who knows? I can only hope that the powers that be fix this issue sooner, rather than later :)