Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Looks like they've only just started so probably won't see anything for some time. Still, as I say for everyone else, if they release and it's good, game on

    Their main website navigation looks, hmm, inspired by the Scirra.com page, lots of similarly named sections in a similar order!

    How did you find this? Since it's only *just* started, I guess you know the developers, or you're involved even?

  • Thanks Shviller, I've put that one in the next build so it wont happen again

  • The problem with using a small group of alpha testers is they will get into a groove with the product and know how to use it and bugs will go unreported.

    That's very true, I think. A lot of bugs have been found and fixed when someone submits something totally crazy to the tracker which makes me think "wtf lol", like using dynamic lighting and physics on objects in a container which spawn and destroy randomly. I doubt myself or regular users would have ever thought to put something like that together, but it exposed a bug, which could then be fixed. I would worry, staying in a private beta, that all that type of testing was not being done, and those bugs would still be present at release.

  • Shviller's right, it might be an issue with premultiplication (a special form of alphablending Construct uses which is faster and better quality).

    Is it just the overlay blend which doesn't look right? I might've got the formula wrong, I pulled it off an old web page I think. Overlay blend uses the following formula in the shader:

        front.rgb = back.rgb < 0.5f ?
		(2 * back.rgb * front.a * front.rgb)
		: 1.0f - (2 * (1.0f - back.rgb * front.a) * (1.0f - front.rgb));[/code:1l7gse77]

Now I don't remember writing this but I probably threw in a few front.a multiplications to do the premultiplication, and they might be wrong.  You could try replacing those lines in Overlay.fx with:

[code:1l7gse77]    front.rgb = back.rgb < 0.5f ?
		(2 * back.rgb * front.a * front.rgb)
		: 1.0f - (2 * (1.0f - back.rgb) * (1.0f - front.rgb));[/code:1l7gse77]
or even
[code:1l7gse77]    front.rgb = back.rgb < 0.5f ?
		(2 * back.rgb * front.a * front.rgb)
		: 1.0f - (2 * (1.0f - back.rgb) * (1.0f - front.rgb * front.a));[/code:1l7gse77]
I don't have your artwork or a reliable reference to the maths behind blending modes (which is often fairly complicated), so you might have to trial and error it a bit.  Or, it'd help if you had reliable information on how rendering works in Photoshop and the likes, because if there is a subtle difference to how Construct and Photoshop render a scene with the same blending parameters, it will of course look different.  The rendering and blending code in Construct (and doubtless Photoshop too) is more complicated than you might think - artists only need to think about what effects look like, but the programmers have to work out the math!  Also, things like the order in which opacity and blend is applied might make a difference.

Where there any other blends that had problems or was it just overlay?

  • There's also http://enigma-dev.org/ - an open source rewrite of Game Maker but translating a GML style language to C (talk about ambitious!). It looks in early days yet, but they're doing the release early release often thing, which is cool.

  • The 8 direction movement is designed for control by human input, and it's not designed for automatic control, which is why (I guess) nobody's tried to make pong like this before. It's really easy to control automatically with some simple events - or an automatic behavior like Bullet - but 8 direction is the wrong choice.

    What was the exact problem? You didn't specify. I'm assuming it's the object moving sideways. If you disable rotation in the behavior to stop it trying to set the object angle, and always set its Y coordinate to a certain value, it seems to work OK, but as I said, best find another way to do it.

  • Or do our devs just drink too much beer while they program?

    Hummm...

    I'm a staunch defender of release early, release often though - we did release early, and it did suck (it took a few builds before save worked and we sucked as coders back then), but we got some early interest and feedback on the program design. It rightly got a reputation for being buggy, but that's well on the mend now. However, release-early-release-often is advocated for open source projects, I guess commercial business has more to lose with a dud first release.

    Who cares if they directed that comment at us (we really are a hobby project anyway), but I would say release-early-release-often is a better model than absolute silence. I don't know why they won't even release a few screenshots or demo games - it would dispel any suspicions of vapourware, nobody's going to run off with their content and steal their millions, people would take them more seriously, and by the looks of things most of their userbase would detonate with excitement!

    Still, no need to get trollish over this, if they release and it's good, game on

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  • Concerning the new build, bananas.

  • All looks beautiful, Mr. Mahler!

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  • I think a lot of people predict doomsday over these things, but I'm sure the Internet will pull through, as it will in future whenever it faces other legal threats.

    The whole thing that makes the internet useful and popular is its openness and freedom. If a law is passed allowing ISPs to limit the pages you look at should they choose to, I can imagine how an ISP offering half the internet could prove quite unpopular compared to a "free" ISP!

    I doubt censorship is even technically possible to implement successfully (given the hordes of hackers who will, to make a point, circumvent it routinely if done), so for now, I'm not too worried about the fate of the internet.

  • Spam could damage the reputation of the project if people see us as needing to resort to spam to promote a program rather than it being quality enough on its own.

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Ashley

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