Znirk's Forum Posts

  • So, for the Portuguese-challenged, here's a rough translation of the text in the screenie. (I couldn't test the actual game, it requires PS 2.0)

    [quote:2f0o5p3l]Sketch is a challenging puzzle game. In the game, there will at first be two blocks. You have to move each to an area that has the same colour as the block. To finish a level and move on to the next, you need to have both blocks in their target areas at the same time.

    You will also find obstacle blocks in some levels. Using these obstacles wisely will often lead to the solution of the current level.

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  • > "Far Cry" is such a fitting name, because it's a far cry from any game that will run on my computer lol (yeah, that's getting old huh?).

    >

    I will be forced to mail you hardware... for free...

    If that happens, I will be forced to start whining about my computer ... :twisted:

  • Wiki says that the system expression "sign(x)" returns x/abs(x) for non-zero numbers. That's -1 for negative numbers, +1 for positives. This suggests the following (untested) expression for "move from a given value towards zero by a specified amount":

    Value-(sign(Value)*Amount)
[/code:1dgemdxb]
Note that this will "overshoot" zero if abs(Value) < Amount; e.g. with Value=1, Amount=2 you get -1.

  • When something moves faster than our eyes can refresh we see a motion blur [...] So I guess a monitor with a refresh that high would look like a construct game with 1 million times motion blur :P

    I don't know what Construct does for "motion blur", but if it's in any way realistic, then the higher the frame rate the less motion blur you get. Or rather, the less motion blur you need: motion blur is an artefact of filming at low frame rates, and recreating it in a game lets you get away with a lower frame rate without looking stuttery.

    Motion blur comes doesn't come from the eyes but from a camera. At a normal movie framerate of 24 fps, each film frame can be exposed for up to 1/24 second. This means that a fast-moving object will produce not just one image of itself, but overlapping images in all the places it goes through during that 1/24 second. This makes the image of the moving object blurred.

    Now shoot the same thing with a high speed camera that takes 500 frames per second (or, for a single frame, grab any still image camera and set the exposure timing to 1/500 second). Each frame can only be exposed for a much shorter time, so the same moving object will produce much less blur per frame: each frame shows the object moving through a far shorter distance. At 1/500 second you're unlikely to see any blurring, unless you're taking pictures of Superman going faster than a tall building.

    The "refresh rate" of human perception is not really a fixed number, but any monitor refresh frequency over 60 Hz or so is fairly pointless because the brain will tune out anything more than that.

  • If I remember, I always click "Disable smilies" when sending a post...

    Try "User Control Panel > Board preferences > Edit posting defaults > Enable smilies by default > No".

  • it is kinda weird that they would put "full version" on it

    I expect "full version" to them means "not a demo with deliberately restricted functionality".

    'Course, Construct has its own limitations, but they're because it's not finished (in the "feature-complete" sense). The overwhelming majority out there, unused to an open-source, release-early-and-often model, would call that a "prerelease version".

  • The XAudio2 API still works for WinXP users right?

    Looks like yes.

  • > runs fine for me

    >

    Well fine then mr. fancy computer pants

    No, seriously. On a Pentium 4 3.06 GHz / Geforce 4 ti 4200 it runs between 65 and 80 fps even while dropping half a dozen beachballs simultaneously. Not blazing perhaps, but by "between 65 ..." I mean "never below 65 fps" (except while moving the runtime window; that takes it to ~50.)

  • Yup, it's broken all right. A minimal example that works fine on XP SP2 (and starts playback within 2 seconds or so even when I throw a 50 MB .wav at it) fails pretty epically on Vista.

    The XP machine: Desktop from 2003 or 04; XP SP2 as mentioned; Creative EMU 10K1 sound hardware (according to the XP hardware management interface).

    The vista machine: Laptop from 2008, Vista home premium SP1. The sound chip identifies itself as a "conexant high definition smartaudio 221". The driver is the manufacturer's (not a generic Microsoft driver); I haven't knowingly updated it since buying this box.

    My minimal .cap contains just the Directsound object and an event saying "Start of layout -> Directsound: autoplay file ..." (whether or not the file actually exists makes no obvious difference).

    Under Vista, no runtime window appears at any point. The system hangs for about half a minute, and when I say "the system", it's pretty thorough -- the mouse pointer responds only intermittently, and the task manager window stops updating. This is followed by the crash dialog:

    "Runtime error - X - An unexpected error occurred and the application was terminated. You may be able to find out more information about the crash by Debugging, and attempting to reproduce the bug."

    Through the debugger it's pretty much the same: hangs half a minute as above, starts drawing the debugger window (incomplete; still no runtime window anywhere), hangs for another 20 seconds or so and exits to crash dialog:

    "Runtime error - X - A crash inside the runtime has been intercepted! The crash may be a bug in Construct. Please report this to scirra."

    Want this copied to a bug report over on Sourceforge?

  • It would be useful if someone could tell me what does and doesn't work in Directsound on Vista at the moment.

    've got a vista box I where I can install Construct. What do you need -- should I just run through the actions on the D-S plugin and report back?

  • Evolution is just a theory. You have no proof, we have faith.

    <giggle> Are you for real? Just a theory?

    Evolution is a theory, which means that people have been systematically trying to prove it wrong but have failed to find any contradictions that required anything more than some minor refinements. It may be wrong, but so far hasn't been shown to be. (Look up "scientific method" and "falsifiability" in your favourite encyclopaedia). Creationism is just a statement with no chance of ever becoming a theory because it isn't susceptible to evidence and testing.

  • Ozsome!

  • If I remember my Physics correctly, all you need to do is calculate the centre of gravity, and make everything fall towards that.

    Soo, do you stay indoors during the day, so you can stand on the ceiling instead of falling into the sun?

    As I understand it, what you can do is simplify the whole complicated mess into a binary tree: In each tick, you take two objects, work out how they interact with each other only (ignoring everything else), and from then on treat them as one object with a common center of gravity (and a mass of the sum of their masses, and a velocity of the resultant vector of their individual velocities). Keep simplifying pairs of objects into single objects until you're down to two. Then you propagate the velocity changes back down the tree until all individual sprites know theirs, update the simulation and start the next tick.

  • You don't need a knife on your hammer to drive nails.

    And anyway, you can never find the hammer when you need it.

  • who lit the match? [...] who made that match?

    Oh, so that's what they mean by "a match made in heaven"

    I'm a materialist or atheist, take your pick. There are no gods; it's just that there are areas of cause-and-effect we don't understand, and some of it we may never work out. I'm fine with not understanding everything, and I think it's unhelpful to "explain" the dark areas by claiming there's a really really big person who did it and then hid behind a tree.