Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Download 0.97 now

    Construct 0.97 is a major update including theming, better family support, a new Plasma object, mesh distortion in Sprites, several other new features, and many significant bug fixes.

    This is one of our biggest releases ever, with the most changes - exercise usual caution if you have projects you are worried about (back them up, or wait a few days to ensure there arent any new bugs). However, I'm hoping everything has gone smoothly!

    Construct is developed free of charge by volunteers. You can support Construct's development by donating via the button on the main page.

    Here's the full changelog:

    Behaviors

    • [ADD] Turret: predictive aiming (uses the LinearAim engine to aim at moving targets)
    • [FIX] Physics: destroyed objects still colliding
    • [FIX] Physics: editing collision masks for rotated objects
    • [FIX] Physics: objects getting stuck when stopped and then using Set Velocity

    Families

    • [ADD] Family manager: can add and remove private variables to and from families in one go. This will be expanded in future to allow for the same thing with behaviors and effects.
    • [ADD] When adding an object to a family, you are prompted to add the family variables to the object. This prevents objects with no variables wiping out family variables when adding them to a family.
    • [ADD] Add/remove variables dialog: when removing private variables, you are prompted if any families are using the private variable.
    • [FIX] Expression type checker could have accepted non-existant family private variable names in some circumstances
    • [FIX] You now cannot mix plugin types in a family. If you try to add a button to a family of Sprites, a warning is displayed and the object is not added.

    General

    • [ADD] Theme selection from Preferences dialog. Affects entire interface. The three coloured 2007 themes are not yet finished - some dialogs will appear unthemed and there seems to be a drawing bug with the ribbon - but the other themes work OK.
    • [ADD] Application properties: Text rendering mode (Aliased, Antialiased, Cleartype). Cleartype seems to produce the best quality results, especially for large font sizes.
    • [ADD] Ribbon 'Events' page: Find
    • [FIX] Properties bar: Locale settings where comma was the decimal separator always was interpreted as an integer. Comma is now supported as a decimal separator as per locale settings.
    • [FIX] More consistent theming of dialogs throughout the IDE
    • [FIX] Undoing an add/remove private variable to an object corrupted the application. These actions cannot be undone until a solution is found.
    • [CHANGE] Ribbon: Removed add/remove layout buttons (they did nothing and you may as well use the project bar)

    Event sheet editor

    • [ADD] System object: LayoutName, LayoutNumber, Sign, Qarp expressions
    • [ADD] System object: On Collision (advanced) and Is Overlapping (advanced) conditions. Allow you to specify the exact objects being picked.
    • [FIX] Passing private variables to plugin expression parameters was sometimes rejected as invalid expression
    • [FIX] 'ceil' expression was not working
    • [FIX] Find & replace dialog: Event numbers of results were sometimes wrong, and dialog did not resize properly. Slightly tweaked layout of dialog.

    Layout editor

    • [FIX] Grids: snap movements/snap resize now working properly
    • [FIX] Grid settings are now saved

    Picture editor

    • [ADD] Status bar tips for all buttons/tools
    • [ADD] Toolbar button for "wrap mode" (allows easily drawing seamless tiled images)
    • [FIX] Some tools not working properly (eg. Flip)
    • [FIX] Problems with opacity
    • [CHANGE] Shift+Crop leaves a 1 pixel transparent border around the image. This improves image quality for rotations & scaling.

    Plugins

    • [ADD] Plasma object
    • [ADD] Sprite: mesh distortion (enable with set distort map size action)
    • [ADD] DirectSound: Set/Get Master volume
    • [ADD] Window: Get window client X/Y
    • [ADD] Particles object: Can now scale and rotate individual particles (construct only uses the fast method if theres no scaling and rotation)
    • [FIX] DirectSound memory economy: frees memory when an autoplayed channel stops (this was not a memory leak, but the memory would still be in use until another sound was played on the same channel).
    • [FIX] Particles object: respects timescaling properly
    • [FIX] Combo box: sort and type options were not working correctly
    • [FIX] 3D Box: crash when using 'Change display resolution'
    • [FIX] List box: 'Add line' did not accept numerical expressions
    • [CHANGE] Default image size for Sprite is larger
    • [CHANGE] DirectSound: Positional sounds engine now more realistic, obeying the inverse square law. New rolloff controls and minimum distance to customise.

    Runtime

    • [ADD] New runtime application properties under 'Advanced': Override TimeDelta, and Timer FPS. If override is enabled, TimeDelta returns a constant value, regardless of the real value. The value given is 1 divided by the Timer FPS (eg. if you enter 50, TimeDelta is always 0.02).
    • [FIX] 'FPS in caption': gave multiplied framerate values when motion blur enabled.
    • [CHANGE] System: 'Timer' expression now respects timescaling, incrementing more slowly with lower timescales. Timer is now higher resolution (previously was to nearest ~10ms, now to 1ms) and more accurate.

  • Attributes are kind of an even more general form of families. Families all have to be the same plugin type eg. Sprites - Attributes don't have to be. They are literally an on/off flag - like you can set a bunch of any old objects to "Solid", and then make an event "Bullet collides with solid". Then "Solid" can refer to boxes, sprites, tiled backgrounds, or anything, which it couldn't if it were a family. However, you can't use events to relate to an attribute in general like you can with a family.

    You can edit attributes by the 'Edit attributes' link in object properties (at the bottom of the list of checkboxes), or in application properties.

    The built-in attributes usually have an effect on various behaviors or plugins. The Platform movement won't fall through 'Solid's, the screen centres on objects with 'Centre view on me', and some plugins like the RTS movement allow you to pathfind around objects of a certain attribute.

    And on second thoughts, I think I'll go paste this on the wiki

  • I think this is a great idea. Construct doesn't ship with any graphics libraries at all. Sadly, I **** at art.

  • all plugins are Visual C++ 6.

    ...except 3D box, which is Visual Studio 2005, and a handful of others. Also, the runtime is built in Visual Studio 2008 (but could be back-ported to 2005 fairly easily).

  • Event 4 should read:

    Text: set private variable 'total' to 0

    This resets the counter 'total', because the next event does the counting.

    Then event 6 should read:

    Set text to Text('Total')

    ie. display the total found by event 5.

    Overall you're doing this:

    Reset count to 0

    Count the total

    Display the total

    Your current file omits the 'reset count to 0' stage, so the next time the events are read, it's adding even more to the old total.

  • It's a future possibility: 3D box was originally meant to be a proof-of-concept, that it is possible to throw some 3D in the middle of the 2D rendering. So theoretically it's possible to do meshes and stuff, but architecturally (under the hood of Construct) things aren't quite as efficient as they could be - so once it's all sorted out and optimised to be as fast as it can - we can then take it further.

    Meshes, mesh animation and such would still make for a very in-depth plugin and entail a lot of work. I think it would be a post-1.0 project - it makes sense to have a solid 2D base before we go hiking off in to 3D land.

  • Well when I run it through the debugger it memory leaks and hangs which means I'm gonna have to spend some time on it. You could, however, go for the old trick: delete stuff until the problem goes away, then work out which deleted thing fixed it. (Don't forget to backup!) If you could give that a try and let me know what "fixes" it, it could save me a lot of time...

  • This looks like a tricky bug. Could you post it to the tracker?

  • [quote:jjcs4cho]Yay! Btw, when does the new build come out? It has been already nearly month since last build.

    It should be out soon. A lot of good stuff in the next build!

    [quote:jjcs4cho]Maybe you could still add qarp() (quadratic interpolation: lerp(lerp(A, B, x), lerp(B, C, x), x), that's useful for smooth curves. People could make smoothly curving paths etc. without math.

    Sounds good. Will try get it in the next build.

  • As I said, it's created automatically but you have to move it on-screen yourself before you see it.

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  • You can tint objects using the colour filter in common properties, though. You might be able to work out something with that.

  • It runs fine here but only red squares appear - this is to be expected because the blue objects created with it by default are created offscreen - if you immedately after 'create object' set the blue object's position to just below the red object's, then you can see it as well.

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Ashley

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